Essays on narratives by Payton Turnage.
Last April I started writing fiction. I have burned out on other modes of art before, so I knew getting my process right—right as in yielding improvement but also enjoyable and sustainable over many years—was essential to achieving any long-term goals. I had questions. Do I write every day? When I start a second draft, do I start with another blank page? How do I know when it's time to move on from the story?
The virtuous die young, or cling to life and putrefy. This is the philosophy that undergirds The Sea of Fertility, the master work of accomplished Japanese playwright and novelist Yukio Mishima. It's a quotidian aphorism you’ve heard before, but the tetralogy’s feat is not proposing the idea for the first time, rather tearing it open and showing you its insides, the vast and fractal-like machine of philosophical understanding it contains.
I am an American with an insatiable appetite for romantic drama. My quest for ever-more-complex geometries of love—you’ve heard of love triangles, but have you heard of love pentagrams?—has lead me from medium to medium, country to country, and after a fifteen-year journey I think I have at last found the frontier of romantic drama in the modern world.