Guest post by The Distractions author Liza Monroy
Liza Monroy is the author of The Distractions and three previous books. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, O (Oprah Magazine), Poets & Writers, Marie Claire, Longreads, Newsweek, Guernica, Catamaran, Jane, Self, Psychology Today, Jezebel, Publishers Weekly, Poets & Writers, Bust and many other publications and anthologies.
What is reality? is a question as old as perception itself, but with the advent of technology such as AI, deepfakes, and chatbots, along with chronic streams of online misinformation, we have new reasons to ask it. This question also inherently connects to another big one: “What really matters?” If something wasn’t real, did it still carry any weight?
As a longtime writer of memoir, essay, and autofiction, I was surprised when I found myself unexpectedly and suddenly “world-building” on the subject of these questions—ones I would naturally have explored in nonfiction realms. I had become a writer out of having been an avid keeper-of-journals as a teen—the daughter of a Foreign Service officer who moved every few years for my mother’s job, the journals were my consistent outlet in an upbringing where change was the constant.
In the journals, I was unknowingly at the time honing my skills of observing the world around me, of being silently detached and a recorder of the realities I saw, which helped me feel less out of place; maybe I was meant to be a camera. It followed that I became interested in creative nonfiction and journalism, especially of the first-person variety. And I loved a good fish-out-of-water story, a category into which my first novel fit squarely. There was so much to the world, why bother making anything up?
When I set out to write my second novel, it was also aligned with this notion. I loved authors such as Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner who to my eye had mastered the tricky autofiction genre.
My novel then began with a simple, everyday occurrence that happened to me: I was ghosted by a prospective romantic interest in the prime of my “I want to get engaged and married and have a family” years, when domestic bliss was the primary thing I longed for and idealized because it was so different from what I’d experienced growing up.
The ghosting in question literally haunted me. It felt larger than life. Which in turn made it feel like the seed, the germination, of a writing project: a novel that would begin with the protagonist getting similarly ghosted but doing something I would never do: transcending online lurking around the ghoster’s social media page trying to locate the reason for said ghosting, and actually beginning to stalk them in what I had taken to calling the “realspace.”
Several failed attempts amounted to a rambling, boring story about my life in Brooklyn, living in a lovely but roach-infested brownstone, trying to find love after graduate school while hanging out with friends from martial arts class. There was no shape, form, rhyme, or reason. Exactly like life. But this is why we crave story: it offers us a structured, shapely form that reality cannot.
Still, writing into a speculative future had not been on my radar. That wasn’t in my wheelhouse—never had been.
But I had grown so tired of screens and using them to keep up with people (and find the answer to the ghosting—which, by the way, did not help me get over it) that a screen-free world announced itself to me: I wish we all went and threw our phones into the sea! (Not really, that would be terrible for the environment, but such was my sentiment.)
What could that look like? I began to wonder. What would replace screens? Tiny drones?
I tried to imagine such drones. They were honeybee-sized. The world had adjusted to them so that talking with them would be seen the way speaking into a phone through an invisible headpiece is today. When that first happened, it looked as if some people were talking to themselves. Now we don’t even entertain that notion. They are simply on the phone.
Dronelets would tell and show all. Record your entire life, play back parts of it at will, create a highlight reel compendium of your “moments,” the best of your existence, to share with you toward the end of your days. They’d be tiny assistants, they’d project what you wanted to see or watch onto any surface. There would be lots of clean surfaces in this future!
But what surprised me most while envisioning my future world of comfort, ease, and distraction was a place called Blue Lake.
Blue Lake came from ideas we’re already used to, like The Matrix or any number of episodes of Black Mirror.
To get to Blue Lake, people enter a pod, are set up with an IV drip of vitamins and nutrition to sustain their physical selves while their consciousness is uploaded to what amounts to either a retreat center or a prison, depending on why they’ve elected to go or been sent against their will. There are different “Content Arenas,” like an Adriatic Coast setting, Grassland Village, Redwood Forest, and Tropical Beach Paradise. In the future world, these settings are long gone, decimated by climate change, but at Blue Lake, attendees can experience them virtually.
Tropical Beach Paradise, or “Tropical,” as it’s known, is the ultimate destination, the one where elective participants opt for, and where those who are inmates can reach upon graduation, when they’re deemed ready to be re-released into the realspace.
In this Content Arena, a bit of the magic is that you can pick up anything and be instantly virtuosic: violin, piano, rugby, surfing, gymnastics, fiction writing — if you take it up in Tropical, you will instantaneously be Mozart, Serena Williams, Stephanie Gilmore, Jane Austen. And without any of the work one really needs to invest, or the inborn talent many at the top of their fields and games seem to have.
While writing and rewriting this section I became increasingly curious about the question as to whether readers would themselves elect to enter a Blue Lake-type space and opt in to these experiences, knowing that it wasn’t “real.” If Blue Lake were real, would you go?
At first, I thought, of course not. It’s too creepy! And knowing it was only a projection, an illusion, an upload, would ruin the whole thing. Wouldn’t it? While I worked on the section, though, I slowly began to change my mind. “In Arena Four they took you forest bathing, in which you were forced to sit on pine needles and contemplate bark. You remained on a balcony for hours listening to bird calls, staring at ‘mountains.’ … You no longer knew what time it was, nor ventured to keep track.”
Then, arriving at Tropical, “Every smell was of fresh salt ocean, sweet coconut, and foods sizzling in oil that would never be bad for your arteries. The sounds: crashing waves, gull calls, and meditative chimes. People took on an extra-terrestrial sheen, reverse-aging by years the instant they emerged through the portal. Everything felt soft to the touch, puppies and seashells.”
Honestly, this sounds amazing, I thought. I’d written myself into a world — a world I’d somehow, through process, trial, and error, built. This was what they were talking about when they talked about world-building!
When it comes to making a world for a story to take place in, I had found something counter to all wisdom and advice about making the world of a speculative novel, creating the rules and following them. I’d come upon something else: let desire and the subconscious speak, just create a place that’s announcing itself to you as one that wants to exist. Let revision handle the rest. It didn’t make for a clean draft, but I finally wrote the whole book that way.
After dreaming up Blue Lake (with thanks to inspirations like said Black Mirror) I like to think that, given the opportunity, I would go. I would be curious if the uploaded-consciousness experiencing of true mastery could somehow translate back to the real world on return. Would I be a slightly better writer, surfer, dancer, musician if my disembodied consciousness had inhabited a form that could do it all?
Blue Lake, and the questions it raises, are buried toward the end of the novel, a little gift for those who make it there. It’s a total change of pace, which I think is the best thing about it.
Perhaps that’s exactly what the realism-oriented writer in me needed.
But ironically, some aspects of the world of my novel “manifested” while I was writing it. And others, like Blue Lake, remain more fantastical. Either way, it’s a world that, funnily enough, feels entirely real to me now.
