Control: How a Crazy Person Writes Literature

I, Dalton Lewis, have paranoid schizophrenia. I hear voices which tell me that it’s the far future and I am in a cell, or that I am traveling far away from my family, unable to talk to them. They alternately say that there is a clone of me, someone who is famous and successful and charming and all the great things that I am not but wish that I am. I live with these voices, all day, every day. They are never really gone.

How does this affect my writing? Well, I sometimes have trouble connecting one scene into another and combining them into a cohesive, logical story. I write scenes that people love and say are great, but they don’t have anything to do with the rest of the story. That focus is important. If you want to write a story you need to write a series of scenes that build towards something and are about something, something fundamental about the human condition.

I also have trouble predicting an audience’s response to each individual scene. When people tell me that a story doesn’t work I don’t know why. I have to evaluate scenes and chapters without knowing if people will like them or have a response to them or not. That’s a common problem, I think — to not anticipate a reader’s response to a line or story.

I also don’t know enough knowledge about the world around me. Writing about things you know about is much more effective because it sounds authentic. Well, I know mental illness, strategy gaming, and little else, so I have trouble writing authentic scenes with cops and lawyers and doctors and all sorts of other people. I need to do the research to sound real, and I don’t always do that enough.

I wrote a novel called Impressions of Suburbia. People say that my writing is getting better even if I’m not the best or most famous novelist. I want to fight really, really hard to express myself, and I wrote a slasher/horror novel to show what might be wrong with contemporary suburbia. I wanted to show both teenagers and fortysomethings living their lives and how they interacted — or failed to interact.

I’m proud of the book even if it doesn’t sell a million copies or win the Pulitzer Prize. I think that I write books that I care about, and that is the key. Write about something that fills you with passion. Care about your stories. Who cares if you write something conventional or commercial? That doesn’t matter. If you write something that you love — that is the key. I did that with Impressions of Suburbia, and I’m damn proud of that.

Thanks, and take care, friends.