Malorie(79)

And I love them.

Hello, I’m Josh Malerman. And I’m a Prolific.

It’s a word that comes under some fire, and the common dismissals go like this: If you write so much, how can any one book or song be truly meaningful to you? Or: It sounds like you’re more interested in having finished a book than you are the actual book itself. Or, this: With all your stuff, I don’t know where to begin. But what the Prolific understands, deeply, is that you can start anywhere in a Prolific’s catalog and work your way in either direction from there. For us, that’s a thrilling prospect, and it’s not unlike “prospecting” insomuch as, either way you dig, toward the earlier work or along the path of what followed, you’re always looking for similar gold. What the Prolific cherishes above all things is not the singular work of art but the canon. The oeuvre. The arc of a creative mind unable to stop itself, the waves created by endless ideas. Have I mentioned that the Prolific believes anything he or she does, at any time, is a snapshot of the whole? That to wait years between projects is akin to having misplaced a thousand photographs from an era that, in hindsight, was much cooler than it felt at the time?

Who wants to miss out on those photos, that time?

I bring this up here for a reason.

The rough draft for Bird Box was written in a twenty-six-day frenzy in October of the year 2006. At the time, and certainly when I started it, it was only the next story to be written. I had the image of a blindfolded mother, two blindfolded children, navigating a river. Nothing more. Where were they going? What were they fleeing? Why couldn’t they…look? All these questions were answered as I went; what began as a possiblity became blood, sweat, and fears, and it’s the closest I’ve ever come to reading a book as I wrote it. And the spirit of such a thing, the idea that I ought to write every day, to get the story done, to add another book to the growing stack of drafts in my office, was unquestionably born of the philosophy of the Prolific. Like the band Guided by Voices and people like Alfred Hitchcock, there was a sense that to stop, to slow down, to (gasp) wait for inspiration, was the equivalent of creative death. You can easily picture the imagination standing on the edge of a cliff, alone, eyeing the abyss below, weighing whether or not to leap. Because the Prolific knows, above all things, that the artist can’t be expected to know which of his or her works are the good ones, which might resonate with other people, and certainly not which idea would be done best when plucked from the field of growing conceits.

Nothing scares the Prolific more than an Idea Graveyard. Not even the ones for the bodies.

So why not write…everything?

In this spirit, Bird Box was begun. She was finished within a storm of songs, tours, shows, and a thousand conversations that, had they been recorded, I might’ve slapped titles on them and described each as small works of their own. Following Bird Box, I simply wrote the next book, a complex 600-pager called Bring Me the Map. But while I was working on Map, and as The High Strung began that next tour, I started getting reactions from the friends and family to whom I’d sent Bird Box.

This is where the acknowledgments come in.

Can you imagine how many people there are to thank, those who encouraged and helped, over the fourteen years between the rough draft of Bird Box and releasing the final, official version of Malorie?

In a word (and, not so coincidentally the title of a High Strung song): legion.

I’ll start with Mom, Debbie Sullivan, who read Bird Box at a dog trial in Indiana and called to tell me there was something to the then 113,000 words that were not broken up into chapters, were not indented, and were written entirely in italics. She liked it. My stepdad, Dave, called me, too. My friend Matt Sekedat, too. My sister-in-law Alissa. I printed the book up for my friend/landlady June Huchingson, gave it to her at night, and found her finished by morning. Her reaction remains vivid with me today.

To these early readers, I scream thank you. For, if it weren’t for a handful reading Malorie’s story in its earliest incarnation, I might not have pointed to it when, later, I met Ryan Lewis and Candace Lake, a managing duo who had read Goblin but knew we ought to begin with something other than a collection of novellas. It was by way of Ryan and Candace, along with the help of the brilliant lawyer Wayne Alexander, that I rewrote Bird Box in a significant way in the year 2010. I chopped the story in half, gutted what felt like repetition, broke the story into chapters, indented the paragraphs, and removed the italics that had, until then, essentially laminated the story in what felt like a dreamlike hue. Ryan, Candace, and Wayne shopped the book to agent Kristin Nelson, whose website, at the time, said she wasn’t interested in horror. And suddenly, it seemed, the book, and myself, had a team. From there, Kristin shopped Bird Box, it was picked up in 2012, I rewrote the book once more entirely from scratch (one of the benefits of being a Prolific is the gumption to write the same book a second time), Universal Studios bought the film rights, and the book was published in 2014. And so began, for me, Malorie’s story occupying a larger place in my life than I could have ever predicted.

Thank you Candace, Ryan, Wayne, Kristin, and Lee Boudreaux, who edited Bird Box and who must’ve been able to tell I’d never worked in a professional landscape before but had the heart not to tell me so at the time.

Still, no self-respecting Prolific will slow down his or her pace just for having experienced some level of success with a single book or song. He or she is constantly looking for windows, a partially open door, feeling for the breeze of a hole in the wall where a story might get in.