Control: Pouring My Heart Onto the Page…

I, Dalton Lewis, finished rewriting my novel on mental illness. It’s called Ascension. When I asked Finnegan what novel to write he kept it simple.

“I want you to write a novel about your experience with paranoid schizophrenia. I want you to write about something you know,” Finnegan said. He had helped me on a sci-fi story about potential futures and social problems, but we hadn’t tackled something this personal.

Philip kept it even simpler.

“Don’t just write about teenagers again,” he said. “Write something new.” He had supported me through a bunch of writing projects and was the first person to pay me to write something, a pair of stories that I wrote for his website bed burrito.

Mom thought it was a reasonable idea, too. She felt like it might help people to understand me better to write about something I was knowledgeable about. She advocated for this, too.

I wrote a novel about schizophrenia. This book is actually an extensive rewrite of an older book called Descension. That book tried to show the reality of life with a mental illness and failed. I think that this book does a better job of that. First I included a lot more direct scenes and cut the early childhood stuff that didn’t really fit with the rest of the work.

I showed the reality of the voices inside of my head by showing it instead of describing it.

You’re dead, the voice said. Raped and murdered. Sorry. You didn’t survive. You’re not that guy.

Um, no? I survived?

No, the voice insisted. You died. It’s the far future. They’re clearing anyone who was accused of framing you. You are dead.

Oh.

I would interrupt the narrative to include the thoughts of the voices and the thoughts that I had in response to them. I also tried to show the audience how hard it is to pay attention to the world around me. I can hardly pay attention to anything anymore.

This novel didn’t play out like the others — in this novel I didn’t make anything up. I just told the truth. I wrote that I didn’t have friends for two years in high school because it happened — I didn’t have friends for those two years in that high school. I also didn’t want an important lesson in the end. In My Little Paradise Mark Sendal is continually learning something valuable about life. Reading Mark Twain taught me not to do that. No one learns anything new. People don’t usually change and are usually fucked up, like my friend who cannot handle money and has a pathological need to rip people off.

I showed the relationships between me and my friends — spending years without friends, desperate relationships which fractured and changed when I did have friends, and even the friends disagreeing with each other. We have a lot of powerful personalities, and not everyone got along or survived. Sal and Simon don’t speak and don’t ever expect to speak. In high school it was the three of us — we were best friends in high school. Now they don’t talk.

That’s how to write — Mark Twain put it best in the introduction to Huck Finn. There are no plots; there are no life lessons; there is just the story. That’s what I included, showing every little bit of my life to the reader. I showed everything that ever happened to me in 123 pages. I loved and lived a life, and that’s what you read if you pick up my book.

Thanks, and take care, friends.