Revelations.

Mark has had an idea for this character he’s writing about for five years now and he hasn’t been able to give her a name in all that time. He has lists of things she does and does not do, he has tables and charts of her past life experience and a catalogue of issues for her to adjust to at some point in the story. What he doesn’t have is a name for this character he’s building, so instead he refers to her as X.

On a lined piece of notebook paper he has taped to the left side of his computer monitor is a brief list of things he likes to keep in mind while he’s writing:

• X is tall
• X is bright and witty
• X has a boyfriend named Tom, or Matt, depending on the draft
• X went to summer camp in the Catskills every year until she was 15
• X is depressed, underweight, and she doesn’t know she has cancer

The cancer thing is going to be her breaking point, that’s when the reader is going to feel a deep and sudden connection to X and want to know what will happen next to her, how she’ll react and whether Tom/Matt will be there for her through it all. It’s the real clinch of the whole story, the pièce de résistance, and he's been saving it for five long years ever since he first wrote down the words, “Her long thin fingers ran across the edge of the envelope as she sighed."

He hadn’t intended for X to be a writer, she just ended up as a writer because being a doctor as he intended for her to be felt too convoluted and besides, he knew nothing about medicine. He knew about writing and so X could easily be a writer herself, and that made it much easier for him to focus on her flaws and struggles and needs without having to reference a desk manual for the correct terminology of it all. It was only logical this way. Logic is never convoluted.

The only person Mark has told about X and her story is his therapist who insists Mark has intimacy issues with his family because of all the pain they have caused him. "Don’t you see," she’d say to Mark, "you are X, you’re projecting your pain into this character. X doesn’t exist, but you exist."

Mark would think about this when he finished each chapter but it never made sense until one day he recalled the trauma of his family’s laughter as he told them he wanted to write. He wished in that moment they all were dying of cancer, a wish he’d never even told his therapist. Mark has only just now accepted that X is being written for the mere reason of spite.

He’s doing this to get back at them all and they don’t even know it. He doesn’t even know it, really. It's convoluted logic.