Writing Toward the Void: Larissa Pham on Facing Your Fears in Fiction

What’s the scariest scenario you can imagine? Mine goes something like this:

Imagine a woman wrote a book—no, a revenge fantasy—about a mentor who abused his power. What if that book’s subject encountered it and challenged her narrative? What would happen then?

This also happens to be the central event of my novel, Discipline.

In the time leading up to pub day, I’ve had the good fortune of getting to talk about Discipline in interviews and on podcasts. Without fail, the first question is always something like: What was the inspiration for this book? I’ve started to bristle at this question, even though I know it’s standard fare, a softball, even. I find myself hedging, being avoidant. I’m reluctant to be honest about the answer, because the answer is: I started writing this book because it scared me—and I also couldn’t look away.

I began my career writing nonfiction, mostly essays and criticism. For many years, my work was intensely personal; I’ve spent a lot of time—and pages—navigating what it means to write with vulnerability and care. But because my work so often came from my life, it didn’t just involve me. Like many other nonfiction writers, I’ve run into the tricky ethical and emotional questions posed when we write about other people. Writing, which is a kind of paying attention, can be an act of love, an illumination. But in writing down my own story, a narrative which necessarily leaves out so many other narratives, whose truth am I eliding?

I came up with the novel’s core conceit—the relationship between Christine and her former mentor, the way she tries to get her revenge, and the way he responds—because I was captivated by, and terrified by, these questions that had arisen in my decade of experience in writing and publishing. The setup had a jagged, dangerous allure: how frightening, how messy, how intimate! What would it mean to explore in fiction something that scared me in life, and to push it to its extreme?

When I tilt my head in the direction of the wind, and listen for the call of the void—faint, threatening—I find the work begins to get really interesting.

There’s a phrase, l’appel du vide, or “the call of the void,” which describes our urge to leap into dangerous situations, as from a great height. It’s the sudden desire to throw yourself off a bridge; the impulse to wrench the steering wheel into oncoming traffic. Feeling the call of the void doesn’t mean you actually want to end it all—paradoxically, the impulse comes from our brains recognizing that danger and averting it, acknowledging our deeper, stronger urge to survive. When I first thought of Discipline’s opening scenario, I thought I recognized that feeling, too. Here was the void: What would it mean to leap?

The nice thing about writing fiction is that we can put our characters through things we’d never be brave—or foolhardy—enough to do. Through our writing, we leap into the unknown. In writing Discipline, I wanted to stage a scenario, one that would allow two characters—a young woman; her former mentor—to confront each other. And I wanted to follow this story to the very end; I wanted to see what would happen when they met.

Christine, my narrator, arrived first in my imagination. I heard her voice, very clearly, in the “I” of first person. Christine is a woman with few possessions—just a suitcase, really—who is very nearly willing to go anywhere and talk to anyone. It’s this openness, this porousness, that allows the novel to unfold. You might say that Christine makes all of her decisions from the edge of the void, diving in where a different narrator might choose self-preservation. She travels from city to city, saying yes to connections and interactions, eventually meeting up with her novel’s villain in Maine.

I have been no stranger to l’appel du vide. I used to be a thrillseeker—I’ve loved the threat of a lit cigarette, a ledge, a night’s unknown turn. As I get older and find that there’s less that I’m willing to lose, I feel, at least in life, myself stepping back from the edge. At the same time, as a novelist, I’ve become more interested in writing from a place of possibility and uncertainty. It was listening for the moments which scared me that allowed me to put Christine through the book’s most powerful emotional passages. Rather than turn away, I leaned over and pushed Christine to leap. And whenever I felt stuck in the writing, I looked to the most unknown corner and asked: What if? This impulse proved to be a powerful guide for the book, one that allowed me to take chances.

I love working from an outline as much as anyone—it’s helpful to know where a project is going. But I’ve found that knowing too much and having too much planned can leave my work dull, predictable even. When I’m not scared, or curious, the work suffers. When I tilt my head in the direction of the wind, and listen for the call of the void—faint, threatening—I find the work begins to get really interesting.

Let’s return to my original question. Is there somewhere that scares you? Some place your characters can go? Don’t turn away: allow them to leap.

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Discipline by Larissa Pham is available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.