The concept is fascinating. A book where two stories (at least) are going on simultaneously — one in the main body of the text, and another in the margins, where two separate readers are jotting notes to one another about the tome, its mysterious author, and each other. The sum total is a reading experience unlike any other one has read in a good while.
That’s the concept of “S.”, a novel released last October from Little Brown and Bad Robot Productions, from a concept by Bad Robot’s owner, Hollywood wunderkind and “Star Wars” reboot director J.J. Abrams. But most of the heavy lifting in the construction of the book was done by a relatively young author — novelist Doug Dorst.
“It’s the one thing I’ve sort of done my whole life, I’ve certainly enjoyed it my whole life,” Dorst said about writing in an interview with Toledo Free Press Star. “And I kind of thought, at some point, if there was a way to make a living doing this thing that I like, I really ought to try.”
Dorst brings a distinctive pedigree to his work as an author, having tried to be a musician before deciding that writing was his true muse. He also teaches Creative Writing full-time at Texas State University in San Marcos.
“The book that probably had the biggest influence in terms of me trying to say, I want to write, I want to try and do this, was T.C. Boyle’s novel ‘World’s End,’ which is just a big, shaggy piece of joyful storytelling,” Dorst said. “It was absolutely the right book for me to have read when I read it, because I read it when I was in law school, which was not a time of tremendous joy. And so to have that — that book did a lot for me.”
In his formative days, Dorst found himself drawn to writing that rejected the ideas of traditional narrative, which made him uniquely qualified when Lindsey Weber of Bad Robot came calling with the idea that would grow into “S.”
“JJ had shared his idea with her his idea for a book project, and may have asked her for suggestions for who to go to. And I think she had read ‘Alive in Necropolis,’ and passed it along to him and suggested that I might be someone interesting to talk to,” Dorst said, referring to his first (and only) novel prior to writing “S.”
“And so then, I got a call from my agent — and I mean, it was out of nowhere — asking, ‘Would you be interested in putting together a proposal, at least, for a project with JJ Abrams?’ And that is not the sort of call one gets every day.”
The kernel of an idea that Abrams had was a book-within-a-book, where another story would take place in the margins of a novel shared between two readers. The idea developed into an expansive and imaginatively assembled text where pages are filled with notes and comments, with additional pieces like newspaper clippings and maps drawn on napkins stuffed inside, as well.
The very tight structure of the piece would lead most any reader to believe it had been meticulously outlined and planned in advance of its writing — which Dorst insists is not the case.
“It was not at all. J.J. and I, and Lindsey Weber — who is the head of features over at Bad Robot, who worked with us a lot on this — we did a lot of talk on foundation work for the characters and a sense of what the structure of ‘Ship of Theseus’ might be like. But a lot of it — yeah, a lot of it I was making up as I went along. And yes, that made for really big — there were many messes that had to be cleaned up later.”
So how did something so breathtakingly constructed result from such a relatively free-wheeling creative process? “I’m an obsessive reviser, for one thing, but we also had a lot of people who really devoted themselves to helping make it work on that level,” Dorst explained. “So Josh Kendel, the editor, did a fantastic job, and we got really got really good feedback from other folks at Bad Robot, and other folks at Little Brown. There was absolutely no way that I could clean up the mess that I made all by myself.”
The end result is one of the most breathtakingly new ideas to come in publishing in a long time — and incredibly exciting for a sophomore novelist whose latest work was promoted with teaser videos and hype one doesn’t often see for a new book.
“It’s tremendous fun. That’s probably the biggest part of it, is getting to watch this unfold, and realizing — wow, this thing that I wrote … to watch it having a life in such an interesting way that’s so different from anything I’ve ever experienced before? I mean, that’s just pure fun.”
