I have this one story, maybe my favorite story but definitely my weirdest story, that I haven’t quite figured out. It’s got all my favorite things: early cinema history, anthropomorphic animals, grocery stores, prehistoric art, surly girl scouts, a last line. I just don’t know how to stitch it all together, so it’s been sitting over a year now, gathering dust. There’s so many things I’ve just barely drafted and then dropped because I felt like I didn’t yet have the tools to write it. But yesterday, seeking out something short to read by the Christmas tree before I have to toss it into the fire pit, I happened to pick up The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander, a used bookstore impulse buy so small I forgot to feel guilty about it languishing in my TBR pile. I read it in one sitting and now I’m sketching out how I might pull off that old story as a novella.

I struggle with a lack of patience as a writer (and as a human being). I want to be good at everything right away, I want to get to the parts that interest me quickly, and I want a reader to keep up without me having to explain. I was a poet before I was a fiction writer, which lends my writing imagery but also obtuseness. I’m all vibes, little plot. It has made transitioning from writing short stories to writing a novel difficult. I’ve been eyeing the novella as a stepping stone between the two. The Only Harmless Great Thing touches on some of my 2AM Wikipedia obsessions—the glowing cat and atomic priesthood proposals for long-term nuclear waste messaging, elephant death rituals, Radium Girls—and some of the big concerns in my own writing: worker exploitation, animal and human relationships, the immensity of time and the rhymes of history. Bolander’s novella both encouraged me, in that it is possible to create something beautiful and meaningful that packs so much in a tight space, and dismayed me, in that way I sometimes feel after reading something I wish I had written.

In this book, Bolander splits the story like an atom, letting it echo across history from wooly mammoth cosmology to a future where humans may not be the only sentient creatures we have to warn about our current shortsightedness because 10,000 years is on the shorter side of just how long nuclear waste might be harmful. The multiple POVs twist together across time and space. It might be labeled a mosaic, with discrete pieces placed side by side to tell a single story, but this book made me think about the limitations of labeling a work a mosaic narrative. Would it be more useful, for my own understanding, to think about the ecology of a story? Not in the sense of a story being about nature, but in the sense that each piece is a living organism and by necessity exists in connection to all other pieces. In reading The Only Harmless Great Thing, the intense limitations of human perspective are stark. Our cognition and our lifespans only allow us to see so far, particularly if all we want is a bird’s-eye view of the picture on the ground. To return to my impatience, I have been looking for an easy way to see a big picture of a story from above. What this book made me consider is that perhaps I need to look at the pieces of my problem-child story from inside, to see where the rhizomes are creeping under the surface connecting my obsessions at a subconscious level.