Massive spoilers ahead for Consequences Chapter 10! Be sure to read it before reading this.

This chapter was quite the doozy. A lot of you saw it coming from far away, a lot of you may have been surprised by it, but above all else, there was a lot of pain in this chapter. Some of this pain might have been similar to something you’ve lived through, or even something you’ve lived through yourself. Maybe you’ve been a cheater, or a cheatee.

I would hesitate to call myself either. I’ve never cheated on a partner, and have been cheated on once in a way fresh, low-stakes relationship, where it didn’t impact me all that much. She told me, I accepted it, and we moved on. Given this context, I really shouldn’t be the one to write about cheating so often, and yet, it’s come up in most of my stories at this point.

Put a pin in that for a second. Keep this point in mind. It may seem like I’m about to pivot to something completely unrelated, but it’s surprisingly relevant.

I recently got up the courage to show off Teacher’s Threat to someone I know in real life after we spoke bluntly about the ethics of power dynamic-based relationships. After reading it, they asked me how I came up with the scene where Amy first rejects Mina, and what my inspiration was. To this person, the scene felt too emotionally real to be entirely fabricated. Maybe a few lines were cheesy and the situation was fantastical, but the emotions felt too real to them to be completely made up. I have never, in my previous work in education, done anything with a student (obviously. I abhor and disavow the very concept). I never did anything with a teacher or professor of mine. And yet, the moment itself was very real in my head as I wrote it down. I could feel the emotions of the characters so vividly in that moment. Both Amy and Mina spoke to me in their own ways.

To an extent, my reading friend is right. There can’t have been zero inspiration. Maybe it wasn’t related to teachers, and maybe it wasn’t something I directly experienced wholly, but there was some sort of moment or even a hypothetical in my mind that bred the grounds for this story to take place. Everything I can write and do is thanks to my experiences. While I never experienced these moments themselves, I experience it vicariously for them, thanks in part to the wide range of experiences I’ve had in my life.

You’ll often hear crackpot writers say, “Do you want to be a good writer? Write every day. That’s the only way to improve.” This advice is dumb and terrible. It isn’t true. Nearly every actually good writer disagrees with it. That said, there’s a version of this that I think is better. To be a good writer, experience something every day, and allow yourself to take it in. Play a new video game, watch a new movie, watch an old movie you haven’t seen since you were a child and take it in with new eyes, walk down a street you’ve never walked down, talk to a stranger (even ordering coffee counts, just be polite to the person serving it to you), etc. Experiences are the backbone of creative expression. We’re nothing without our memories and reactions.

I don’t write about cheating because I’ve experienced it a lot. I have virtually no direct experiences with cheating on either end. If I had to draw up any direct experience for this chapter, it would probably be from two things. Number one, I’ve made a friend recently, and quickly lost them. I was too emotionally intense, and they were distant and independent, and we rapidly went from “messaging for several hours a day” to “they actively want time away from me.” We had good memories, but at the first sign of the connection lessening, I began to hurt, and a lot of my hurt spilled over. It was my fault. Number two, in the last place I lived, I shared an apartment with a couple. The boy cheated on the girl, and once she found out and got upset, the boy became so wracked with guilt that he drank alcohol and ran out of the house and cried a lot. He was upset, but also… he made everything about him. For the rest of the night, the girl had to console the boy, even though he was the one to cheat on her. Young people, and particularly young men, are like that a lot; doing something bad, having to face consequences for it, and making the whole thing about the consequences they had to face for their own actions. (I’m sure you can see the parallels to the story here.)

Aside from these two events, everything I wrote about was just how it feels the story played out. I felt these emotions vicariously for these characters just as I did in Teacher’s Threat. A lot of the time, my own experience helps me, but sometimes, you need to trust that your mind will feel what is emotionally right for these characters. Experiencing things for yourself helps a lot, but so does trusting yourself. I’ll talk to you all next week.