Ancient alchemy, as Erin Vachon described it to a handful of writers over Zoom for a workshop through SmokeLong Quarterly, began with a process of decomposition called Melanosis. Transformation is a long procedure in this sense, and it begins with fragmentation. For writers, as Erin put it, this extends to our understanding of the assumed form and content of what we seek to revise. This could be as simple as writing from the perspective of another character. For nonfiction writers, this might be an exercise in empathy. As they walked us through this workshop built on the esoteric, I understood what they meant as I found myself writing from the perspective of Irish bog bodies looking up from the water, scolding the living.

Somewhere in my notes, I wrote the word subcutaneous to describe the underlying thematic concerns in a story, which are baked into the language at the sentence level. The story I selected to revise was an older work from almost a decade ago, and the prose was embarrassingly self-explanatory. This realization would have been mortifying were it not for the necessarily destructive first step. Like water from a sponge, I compressed the story to see what meaning would drip out between the lines.

I’ve been working to revise the story so much that it has become something else entirely. Maybe this means the loss of one story, and maybe it means the creation of something new, but if the logic of alchemy holds, the transformation is more of a visible realignment of what appears on the surface. The energy is the same, but metabolized differently.

I have not written anything new in a long time. I have been stuck in a revision-spiral reexamining my work, squeezing it, seeing what I can extract from it and then losing sleep over not writing anything new.

But I did have the pleasure of seeing an interview I conducted with another writer friend, Cavar, be published in Archer Magazine. Describing their process for writing a speculative, dystopian novel, they said something that has stuck with me: “I realised that part of writing a book like this means writing up to the very point at which I don’t know enough to write anymore, which is why you see so many crumbling syntactical moves and blanknesses in the novel.” The narrator in Failure to Comply gets around the challenges inherent to their world by dodging the inevitably limited power of language to convey meaning. Even if everything is knowable, it is certainly not all expressible.

Blankness and absence are confronting when they lack a clear explanation, when language offers nothing to describe what isn’t there. Shouldn’t it be obvious what needs to be said? Shouldn’t the words be abundant?

As much as I try not to lean too hard into esoteric mysticism in describing writing, there’s comfort in being able to attribute its power to something obscure. The late David Lynch described his own process similarly: “A film or TV show is like a magic act,” he said in 2018, “and magicians don’t tell how they did a thing.”

In grad school, colleagues told me my writing style was intentional and precise, which I attributed to the dry but grounded historians I read so much. Lately, to help me sleep or because I have rotted and decomposed into my elements through melanosis, I have been reading Vladislav M. Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union before bed, which I got over a year ago after seeing that Noah Kulwin, of the podcast Blowback, recommended it. The language in historical writing is intentionally unambiguous, which is a false comfort. Writing against ambiguity is like eating to never be hungry again.

The mystical veers uncomfortably close to the diagnostic. I discourage my students from thinking of revision as a way of “fixing” their writing, but I’m susceptible to that language, too. It suggests a wrongness, and more wrongly, it suggests that the removal of that wrongness is all that good writing needs. But fixing is more urgent than alchemy. Heaters and plumbing and bigots need to be fixed. Writing is in a constant and gradual state of change.

Because there is no “correct” form that a piece of writing will take, there is no predictable future for an artistic vision. What I want to write could become anything, and it takes confidence to give up so much control that I might constrict what my writing can become.