hi! thanks so much for sharing the roots grow riotous :) i was curious if you'd be willing to talk at all about the inspiration for the "magical realism" aspects of the story? where did the idea for lwj's plants come from what do they represent for you etc?
Hi! Thank you so much for asking, Iād be glad to!
Roots was actually first conceived of as a straight forward zombie story! Around that time Iād seen The Girl With All The Gifts, and read The Wilds by Vita Ayala (iykyk), both of which have zombies combined with heavy botanicals. I wanted to do horror, which was new for me, and had this idea of doing a genre switch: starting with a New Yorky romcom Wangxian that becomes an Escape Manhattan zombie horror halfway through (idea free to a good home). But I was talking the concept out with my spouse and they asked, whatās the point? Whatās the message? Zombies as a trope have clear and longstanding metaphorical underpinnings, and what I wanted to do didnāt really fit with those. So I reimagined it from a story about structural harm to personal harm. When itās a personal journey, destruction and societal breakdown (with plants) naturally change to stagnation and creation (with plants).
I should mention two important bits of context: first, I started writing Roots in the early days of Covid, in NYC, sandwiched between several hospitals. And second, which is something Iāve never actually talked about publicly, I was going through some unrelated, intense medical trauma at the same time. Being afraid of what your body will or will not do, and what it is capable of, was uhhhhh yeah it became a very important theme š .
But I didnāt know that when I first started writing Roots. We always write about ourselves etc etc and itās not the first time Iāve figured out what I really meant halfway through. (Cannot WAIT to find out what Iām really writing about in my current project, which is an original horror novel about a subway monster, sort of). I was bitter about how much I loved working in manufacturing and how much it took advantage of me, which is of course one of the overt plots. The magical part of it came in wanting to talk about how if we donāt change, we die. We have to push through stagnation even though itās really painful to create and to know ourselves.
I felt stagnant, because I was trapped in my house with ambulance sirens/cop sirens/helicopters going literally 24/7 for literally months with death all around, Iād made a career change that was extremely not working out for me, and I was so violently divorced from my own body that I ended up having a nervous breakdown about it. But when I came to the end of the story I saw that āNever kill yourselfā was the only thing I COULD say - to myself and to everyone who was reading it. I had to say that we have to grow and keep living, and also stay connected to something I see as an extremely fundamental part of ourselves, which is creativity. I think this is something that is really hard for us to hold onto these days, and unfortunately has only gotten worse since Roots was written. But without it, we lose what makes us real.
Itās why I never felt the pressure at all to explain WHY he was growing plants, because it didnāt matter in the context of what I wanted to say. Also I think if I had given some in-universe explanation of Why, it would have vastly weakened the story. Plants = growth is a very basic metaphor, but you donāt need to have an original thought to make a good story out of it. And it helped to think of the plants as a very simple tool, because everything else was so complex. The other half of the story was explaining how private equity ruins everything. The plants couldnāt also be convoluted because it would be unreadable.
This got a little long! And also very personal š š. At the time I mostly just felt comfortable talking about the craft of it (it was a VERY HARD STORY TO WRITE), but I donāt remember that part as well these days. Now I have enough distance to admit that Roots is an intensely personal story that I was amazed resonated so strongly with people. But honestly given how hard things were for most of us in 2020 I should not have been surprised.
I'm so sorry for the medical trauma, and so happy you managed to get through that, alive and well. I don't know your definition of well, but I hope you are close to it.
I remember being intrigued by your Twitter posts about the writing process, but also the ones about manufacturing and logistics and pollution from the textile industries, and all of that combined into background for my reading of the fic, I think. The author is (not) dead and the story got better by it.
This story, with all its convolutedness and unexplained imagery, has stayed with me since I started reading it, and is also responsible for getting me into mdzs. I just had to know more about the characters of canon to understand your story better. And that is a decision that has given me so much joy and entertainment and opened up a culture that I knew nothing about! Came for the wwii queers, stayed for the sad gay cultivators, expanded to learning more about fantasy, ancient and current China, picked up a tiny bit of the language, some pop culture, etc. I feel like a richer person now than what I used to be.
So, thank you for all of that!
PS: I've wondered why you took the fic down, are you comfortable talking about that? I'm guessing no, since you have chosen to not put it back up on ao3. But it feels weird to not ask about it. Please ignore if you don't want to talk about it.
I am well! I should have said that in the first post. I have had a lot of therapy about the medical stuff, I have a really good job that values me and treats me well, and I have a lot of love in my life. The last few years have been extremely tumultuous, which is why I dropped off the face of the fandom earth, but most people are having a tumultuous time of it, and I still work in manufacturing so given the tariff bullshit and the Iran War, thatās a little inherent to my day to day. I started writing again (both fandom and original work) and itās brought me a lot of happiness.
Let me do a cut so this doesnāt get too long again.
