Pretend by Mary Williams
Pretend I am your mother. Pretend you love me the way you did when you were small, and the world was big, and you could still feel, in some deep primordial way, that not so long ago, my body…
Author: Mary Williams
Pretend I am your mother. Pretend you love me the way you did when you were small, and the world was big, and you could still feel, in some deep primordial way, that not so long ago, my body…
I wrote “Pretend” in a generative writing class that followed a method our instructor, Andrew Blevins, pulled from Jesse Ball’s Notes on My Dunce Cap. We wrote and shared a story every week. When the class met, we broke into small groups and instead of a traditional critique, we only asked open-ended questions about one another’s rough drafts.
Coming up with stories at such a fast pace required impulsiveness. It forced me to rely on my fixations. What was I thinking about? What recent conversations had stayed with me? What images could I not get out of my mind? Each week, I linked my messy thoughts into a Beginning, Middle, and End. I shared my draft with the group and left with a list of questions and ideas, motivated to revise.
When I revise a draft, my goal is to analyze what’s working and what isn’t. Sometimes, I end up rearranging the whole story. I do my best to embrace this part of the process. As Deesha Philyaw says in her interview with CRAFT, “Writing is rewriting.” I attempt to examine everything, even the elements I don’t end up changing.
For example, “Pretend” begins in the second person imperative, addressing the reader directly: “Pretend I am your mother.” It’s unusual. But I decided to keep it because the story is about the many ways we engage in imaginative play, and I wanted to highlight that fiction is one of those ways. When I write fiction, I’m saying: Pretend that when I write “I,” it isn’t Mary Williams, but a secretive unnamed woman using fake online personas to connect with her adult children.
Hopefully, the reader agrees, and we get to play Pretend together for a little while.
MARY WILLIAMS writes fiction and essays. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Tin House, and Harvard Review, among others, and her novel was a finalist in the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest. In 2023, she attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She’s currently working on a linked short story collection that explores how human nature and technology shape one another. Find her on Twitter @mardragosa.