Invitation Situation and Fly on the Wall

Chapter 43 and 44 were originally a single chapter, but upon reviewing them for publishing, I realized I had a storytelling problem on my hands. I probably talked about this in an earlier post, maybe one of the earliest ones, but the first official draft of Maladaptive was like 80-85% in Cara's POV, with a few chapters told in a third person omniscient perspective, about 15-20%. The reason for that was that there was information that felt important to include, but Cara wasn't present to witness it for her retrospective retelling of events. I didn't love it, but it seemed to solve that problem at the time.

But during rewrites, it became clear to me that this was clunky and actually didn't really make sense in the overall narrative of the story. So the problem of, "how would Cara know this information when she wasn't there" was something I needed to deal with. It ended up not being a difficult thing to resolve because as it happens, the story has a built-in device to handle a problem like this: Cara's imagination.

So I went through the entire draft and thought I had identified all the places where this POV misalignment needed to be fixed. Turns out, I missed a couple chapters, which brings me to the chapters I'm talking about in this post.

In Chapter 43: Invitation Situation, Cara reads the message Styles sent to Zinnia Sherwood using a contact form on the platform where her book is published, inviting her to appear on his podcast. The viral "Who is Zinnia Sherwood?" mystery and the explosive popularity of her book is exactly the kind of thing that lights him on fire, and, ambitious as he is, there is no way he was ever going to let it pass him by - it could be his own next big viral moment.

(Before the rewrite, I had a third person narrative of Styles and his producer Magda talking about the Zinnia Sherwood mystery and how it would be amazing if they could get her on the podcast for an exclusive reveal. I solved that POV problem by simply turning this into an actual email exchange between Styles and Zinnia (Cara, unbeknownst to him), making it information she can share with us first hand.)

His offer is actually somewhat enticing to Cara. She's become concerned that this viral mystery about Zinnia Sherwood's identity could lead to her true identity being exposed, and that would be disastrous in her mind, because she wouldn't get to control how people react, especially the people she loves the most.

So the idea that revealing herself on his podcast means she can do it on her own terms in a "controlled" way (the question being, how much control would she really have?) is something she sort of considers. When she daydreams the scenario about how it might go, it takes a decidedly vindictive edge. If revealing herself means she's going to possibly go down in infamy, then she indulges in the idea of taking Styles with her.

But the daydream is enough to satisfy that particular notion, and she declines his invitation for all the reasons we expect at this point. He tries to counter with an amended invitation that will allow her to participate in the podcast while remaining anonymous. He says that he's started to read the book in preparation for their meeting, and notes that he feels a kinship with the narrator in the same way that other readers have expressed, that she feels like a friend.

Which of course sends Cara reeling from the fear that he's extremely close to figuring out that she, the narrator, and Zinnia Sherwood are all the same person, leading to the inevitable disaster in her mind. 

Chapter 44: Fly on the Wall finds Cara now imagining what Styles is thinking as he is reading her book. This was another part that was originally written in third person omniscient, describing Styles' reaction as he reads the book. Obviously, the fact that Cara is not there to witness this means that she couldn't possibly know, and that's where the daydreaming element already inherent to this story ended up becoming the perfect solution to that problem. Cara imagines herself as a literal fly on his wall, watching him react to her book in real time.

She even deliberately sets limits on her own abilities by taking the form of a fly in this daydream, meaning she can't intervene in any way. She can only observe. Now, it's her daydream and she can obviously control whatever she wants to about it, but this choice to be powerless to make certain things happen or fulfill certain wishes is about acknowledging that she does not in fact have any control how he reacts to her book. 

This self-prescribed lack of control even means that she recoils when it seems like he is becoming aroused by a steamy part of the book and seems like he intends to masturbate. It feels wrong for her to "watch" him do that when he has no idea she's observing him as a fly on his wall. He changes his mind (or maybe he was just adjusting himself, who knows?) which is maybe Cara subtly intervening as a way of stopping herself from daydreaming about him in that way. We don't really know, because she maintains this "I'm just a fly, I'm powerless to do anything but watch" intention, at least outwardly. 

(This has me thinking about whether or not Cara is a reliable narrator. It's not something I've thought about before, but now I'm wondering. I think I need to ponder that a bit more before I get into that, maybe once I finish discussing the story at the chapter level and move to a discussion of the book as a whole.)

Styles finishes the book, and there is a moment when he is processing what he just read and realizing that Zinnia Sherwood is, in fact, Cara, where he suddenly seems to become aware of Cara's presence. He actually sees "her", this fly on his wall, and at first it looks like he's going to swat her/it, but is overtaken by his own emotions about events in his time with Cara that he is remorseful about, and doesn't swat the fly. What I love about this is that it opens up the question about this wavelength connection they had, or maybe even still have, to some degree. 

By choosing to only "observe" in this daydream, did she somehow slip out of her imagination and into their shared stream of consciousness that she described earlier in the book? And in doing so, did he actually sense her presence? With his attention focused on her, had he also slipped into that stream? Or, when she imagined herself as a fly on his wall, did she inadvertently put herself into the body of an actual fly that might have been on his actual wall, while he was actually reading her book? Did she Being John Malkovich herself into a fly's body and watch him for real?

This might be one of my favorite magical realism/metaphysical unknowns in this entire book, and it wasn't even something I originally planned to do. It happened as a result of me trying to solve this POV problem and using the fly on the wall as a device to put this part of the story into Cara's POV. It's a late addition, the unintended result of a rewrite, and I think I am in love with it. 

The chapter doesn't end there. Cara now imagines (or, as we've just established, actually potentially witnesses in real time) Styles calling River on the phone to ask if he's aware of the book and what he thinks about it.

After telling Styles that he's somewhat familiar with it and what it's about, Styles tells River that he's sure that the author, Zinnia Sherwood, is Cara. That Cara wrote the book, and that she deliberately wrote it about what happened between them in L.A. as a way to get revenge on him for ending their partnership.

River accuses him of being paranoid, and insists that Styles is just seeing things because he feels guilty. But he then he humors him, and says that if Cara did write that book, then she had every right to, and if he suffers any kind of fallout from it, it's his own doing, not hers.

The phone call leaves Styles wondering if he is "the villain" in this story, and deciding that if things are going to unravel, he needs to do the unraveling himself, in the name of getting to the bottom of his suspicions and getting in front of any damage. He's no longer interested in letting Zinnia Sherwood control her narrative - he's taking control of it, leaving us wondering just what he intends to say to Cara when he texts her at the end of the chapter.