Just One Thing with Trevor Shikaze

We’ve never read anything quite like Trevor Shikaze’s January issue story “Calamity School.” It tumbles forward into greater and greater absurdity—how could we not publish it? Here’s just one thing from Trevor about his piece:

“Guru Jon came out of nowhere one day in the summer of 2016. I don’t believe in ‘writer’s block,’ but I believe in ‘crappy writing,’ and I was doing a lot of that. I’d been trying to write about God and aliens—as usual—but the work I was producing was too close to me, or too theoretical, or lame, or boring, or earnest in the bad way. I can’t write well about God and aliens because it’s all I want to write about. I write fiction, not field guides: there’s got to be some tension. For instance, would you want to read a novel by a foot fetishist about a foot fetishist who successfully mounts feet for 300 pages? No. But you might want to read a novel about a foot fetishist who never successfully mounts a foot for 300 pages. Or who never successfully mounts a foot for 299 pages, and then, on the 300th page, mounts a foot. (If that’s even what foot fetishists want—I don’t know.) So there I was, writing novels of crap about people and doubt and Encounter, and none of it had legs, and so I did what I always do when I get writer’s block (a.k.a. when all I can do is write novels of crap): I sat down without a single idea in my head and put my hands on the keyboard and typed. ‘Everyone should celebrate life,’ I typed. Because it’s true. Then, since I’d typed something true, but didn’t want to sound earnest in the bad way, I typed a second sentence that set up a joke a few sentences later, and I kept typing sentences, many of which were jokes, and in about half an hour I had typed out ‘Calamity School.’

The thing is, if you’re earnest, and you write fiction, sometimes the only way to not be lame and boring is to write around what you want to say, often without a single idea in your head. That’s what Guru Jon is for, I think.”