You’ll think I’m making this up, but Mr. Palm Beach came to me in a dream. On January 11, 2024, about nine months after my father died, I had a nightmare in which I encountered a young version of him raiding the fridge. It was unsettling enough to wake me up. As I drifted back to sleep, though, I thought of this line: “Now that he’s dead, my father’s hungrier than ever.”

 

I liked it so much that I dictated it into my phone. Then I added another line and another and another until I had a pretty good chunk of text. Here it is, with slightly corrected punctuation for readability:

 

Now that he’s dead, my father’s hungrier than ever. My mother tells me this, and I right away correct her English. I say she is hungrier than ever maybe? No, she insists. Your father. He’s in the kitchen. Then she takes me to the kitchen.

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Sure as shit, there he is. In the kitchen. Thirty years younger than he was when he died. Eating, of all things, cold chicken. TV sitcom style. Right off the bone. Which makes a kind of weird sense. If you return from the great beyond, why not come back as a TV cliché? Something familiar. Something harmless. Something good.

 

He is standing in front of the open refrigerator in his work clothes, the way he looked every day at six o’clock. He is in good spirits, my mother says. She thinks this is funny. Joe [sic] he would like. It is not funny. It is terrifying. Terrifying is the word, or horrifying, I tell her. But she is right. He does look happy. Happier than he was.

 

I’m guessing “Joe he would like” means “A joke he would like.” (Turns out Siri had a hard time interpreting my middle-of-the-night mumbling. Go figure.) It’s interesting to see that I was imagining the mother character as having trouble with English, which makes no sense. Then again, a reanimated father eating chicken makes no sense either.

 

So, sure, stories can occasionally start in a cinematic way—a flash of inspiration that keeps you up at night. But that’s rare, and you can’t rely on it. Leonard Cohen said, “If I knew where songs came from, I would go there more often . . . The real song, where that comes from, no one knows. That is grace. That is a gift.”

 

I hope you’re lucky enough to get such gifts. Either way, though, the process always requires a lot of unglamorous tenacity and hard work—discovering the essence of a story, working out the tension, developing characters, bringing all that to the surface in a compelling way, and so on. In other words, the craft. The fun part.

 

Somebody other than Hemingway said you should write drunk and revise sober. The reality is more nuanced than that. (I’d argue, for example, that revision is writing.) But there’s some truth to it. First drafts require a paradoxical combination of focus and obliviousness. On a first draft, you need a kind of cocky naiveté that allows you to ignore the persistent This is awful, this is awful, this is awful pounding in your head. There will be time to make it good later. When you’re drafting, just keep going. Finish it. Make it dreamlike.

 

It helps, apparently, if you’re half asleep.​