Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 6: Imposter Syndrome.

text by Gideon Jacobs (and Brad Phillips)

Chapter 1 

I’ll write the first chapter, but please know that I am very wary of being someone who takes charge of group projects, someone who breaks the silence after the teacher asks for a volunteer to captain the science olympiad team with an earnest “I’ll do it,” or even worse, an “I’ll do it” of feigned reluctance. I was never that guy in school. No way I wanted to do that much work. But I also didn’t want to be associated with any projects that I considered poorly executed, so unless my “I’ll do it” volunteer was smart, I tended to give so little effort that I could not, in any scholastic court of law, be considered a bonafide collaborator.

I assume you weren’t and aren’t a group leader either. Maybe that has something to do with why we get along OK. But our similarity in this regard, our relative non-assertiveness in group dynamics, leaves us in danger of playing a game of beta-male chicken in which we both insist on deferring the alpha position to the other. So, to save us from such a fate, I’ll bite the bullet, feign reluctance, and get us started.

I think it would be good to begin with a handful of vignettes of pretty straight narrative prose that seems freighted with meaning and significance. It doesn’t matter much if it’s actually freighted with anything at all. I guess that makes “seems” the key word here. I suggest this mode of writing because, in my opinion, this is what everyone wants pretty much all the time, to like art and not be totally sure why they like it. To be clear, I don’t mean this as a negative quality in a reader. I see it more as having something to do with our desire to feel stuff rather than know stuff, to sense that there’s more rather than having the “more.” It makes sense. We are a species that, at its core, doesn’t trust itself, and so, a desire to keep reading that can’t be explained is much more likely to succeed than one that can.

With this in mind, why don’t I make all these vignettes in the first chapter about pairs of characters whose names start with the same letters as ours: “B” and “G.” This will likely have readers assuming that I’m trying to say something about us, or authorship in general, or trying to send you a coded message, or all the above. The whole exercise will be nauseatingly self-referential, but nausea is only painful when moderate. Once nausea gets to a certain level of acuteness, one usually purges and feels better—it hurts more to bend than to break. Let’s get our audience puking right away. 

Chapter 2

So, as you’ll be writing this chapter, feel free to do whatever you want and ignore this “outline” entirely if you so please. That said, I think this is where we really need to sell the exquisite corpse element of the project, to satisfy our readers' curiosity as to how this little experimental writing conceit of ours is going to work. It doesn’t have to be too complicated. Maybe it’s as simple as picking up a couple threads that I began in the first chapter and running in surprising directions with them. That’s the pleasure of the proper exquisite corpse game after all, to extrapolate incorrectly in ways that leave you with a Frankensteinian drawing in the end. Let’s give people the Frankenstein they want, the Frankenstein they deserve.

Also, maybe you should switch genres here. Like, if my first chapter is pretty straight literary fiction, you could take a hard left turn into Raymond Chandler territory, or even better, John Grisham land. Isn’t the book that you’re currently working on kind of a pseudo hardboiled novel? Or just vaguely pulpy? Am I misremembering? Either way, it seems that genre fiction is very hip right now, one of those things that is so inherently uncool that it’s cool now, so lowbrow, shameless, and unabashedly manipulative that the literati are beginning to fetishize it. I would be very pleased if you make chapter two something worthy of a lonely top shelf of the proverbial airport Hudson News.

Chapter 3

I’ve been wanting to write some sexy stuff, so maybe I’ll do that here. I’ll choose a character from chapter two and devise some scenario that gets them fucking and sucking. I really like writing about sex, not because I like sex more than the the average fucker and sucker but because, as discussed, I am easily distracted, easily bored, and sex seems to hold my attention. 

For example, writing this little outline was starting to turn into a bit of a chore (and I’m not even halfway done!). After I quickly wrote the first paragraph, I purchased some socks on the internet, drifted away from my desk and took a nap. When I woke from the nap, I didn’t feel like finishing this outline, so I ate a snack. When I finished the snack, I still didn’t feel like going back to the page. Then I had the idea that we could write some sexy scenes into our project, and I drifted back to my desk. It was that cause-and-effective.

 I’m not trying to say something hideously cliché about the allure and power of sex, not trying to make the kind of wink-and-elbow observation that bozo uncles of the world tend to back up by citing that ubiquitous yet totally nonexistent study that claimed men think about sex every seven seconds. But I am pointing out that sex, maybe better than anything in this world, can grab a wandering mind. That is, sex sells not because we’re all so goddamn horny, but because flesh is, in a way, always the shiniest surface in a room.

 Chapter 4

This is where I imagine you pull back the curtain and start writing about us writing this serial novella. Sure, even our most forgiving critics might cry that, right here, in chapter four, is where things got a little too “postmodern” or too “meta,” but frankly, there was no way we were going to avoid talking about ourselves in this project.

Why is that? Well, I think we’re both a little self-oriented. Apologies if you don’t like that label. I know it doesn’t sound very nice. I’m not calling us narcissists, though. I just think, knowing you a little and knowing myself a lot, that we both suffer from distinct psychological issues that share the similar symptom of having our respective outward gazes constantly turning inward.

I’ll stop speaking for you now, and just say that my periodic bouts of crippling depression are what have made my brain my most urgent interest, my most compelling project, my most relevant subject. I am very preoccupied with how I think and feel. I am obsessed with my own experience of the world, not because I think my experience is significant or important, but because my capacity for mental anguish is a product of my thoughts and feelings, and my mental anguish is, by far, the most weighty force in my life.

Actually, now I’m rethinking my previous claim about flesh being so “shiny.” Pain is shiny. Pain is loud. Sure, it’s hard to do long division while your penis is in someone’s mouth. It’s impossible when there’s a knife in your thigh.

I’ve never had a knife in my thigh. I’ve actually never had a broken bone, never even needed stitches. (When people are aghast at these facts, I usually respond that I’m simply very graceful.) The point is, we both suffer from diagnosed mental maladies, and these maladies make us a little self-obsessed. So, in short, let’s do what we do best, and write about ourselves.

Chapter 5

We’re both pretty into suicide, huh? Maybe in this chapter I’ll introduce the idea that this whole project is actually wrapped up in some plan for some kind of murder-suicide performance piece. Maybe I’ll also reveal that we’ve been cheating this whole time, that I attempted to a rough outline of the project. Maybe I’ll even hint that the outline will be included in chapter seven.

Chapter 6:

As you can probably tell, this outline has started to feel like a chore again. I’m tired. I’m bored. I want to go eat three bosc pears in under two minutes. 

Write about whatever you want in this chapter. We’ll figure it out.

For more from Gideon Jacobs, follow @GideonsByeBull on Instagram. Click here to read Chapter 6.