Andrea Caswell
A CRAFT CHAT WITH ELAINE CHEKICH

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

In “Accidental Roommates” (Issue 46), writer Elaine Chekich creates a protagonist whose traumatic losses lead the reader on a perilous journey through the streets of Hollywood. Chekich spoke to senior fiction editor Andrea Caswell about this story’s origins in flash, and how revision helped her build on the “heartbreak center” around which the action revolves.

“Characters who get up and walk and talk of their own accord fascinate me.”

Elaine Chekich

Andrea Caswell: “Accidental Roommates” was originally written as a shorter flash piece, is that correct? What made you decide to expand it to a longer story, and how did you go about it?

Elaine Chekich: I was curious to write a flash piece, mainly to see if I were technically up to it. I’d had a recurring image, for months, of a skateboarding teenage girl slicing through the streets of Hollywood. I decided to make this brief figment the lead character in a flash story – she would be a young veteran returning from Afghanistan, with a mother in the hospital due to Covid. The flash story that ensued, “Brainzapping on the Metro,” was published in 2021. It was under a thousand words, very contained, focused on the veteran’s PTSD and the tension between her and her sick mother. I loved the main character: despite her hard-knock life, she was incredibly resilient in the face of catastrophe.

 I took a short fiction class two years later, and the first exercise was to write the set-up of a new story. The skateboarding female from my flash piece sprang to mind. To enlarge the story, I needed to open up “Brainzapping,” and generate an incident, populate it with minor characters, and give her a backstory, strong motives, and a defined want or desire. After four drafts, slippery sections started to gel, and I was willing to move them around. The opening, for example, initially occurred later in the story. Over the course of nine drafts, I reworked the ending, tightened dialogue, rewrote action scenes, and enhanced image sharpness.

Andrea: The narrator’s voice is both raw and restrained; she’s an expert at understatement. Did you “find” her voice right away, or did you have to keep listening to get it right? I love the skillful way you’ve used her voice to convey deep emotion about traumatic events.

Elaine: The substance of Tracy’s first-person voice was there from the start, but I had to work at balancing it. She’s a forceful character with a decisive posture—not exactly swagger, as she isn’t arrogant, more like solidly forthright. Her voice is a mix of pathos and chutzpah, and she’s given to extremes, so her language and delivery can seem crude or domineering, rather off-putting. She’s a willful character, and I have to pay attention when I write her. Characters who get up and walk and talk of their own accord fascinate me. It’s almost as if the writer has built them with too much identity.

Since Tracy’s character is 21, I wanted to include some gen-z slang, mixed with military jargon to give her voice authenticity. It wasn’t only a matter of learning new words, but also the nuance of their usage. A coterie of 21-year-olds gladly helped me out, quizzing me with relish, just short of making flashcards. My favorites from the new words I learned are situationship, meaning a romantic or sexual relationship that isn’t defined, and rizz, short for charisma.

Andrea: How did your time spent teaching veterans inform the development of this story and its main characters?

Elaine: My urge to write the story is the direct result of teaching a group of female veterans at a small college in Los Angeles. They were whip-smart, fall-down funny, spontaneous, and in pain. At first, they were skittish in a civilian classroom, like, What are we supposed to do here? As they relaxed, the class began to hum with their pleasure in learning. They also started to share stories I felt they weren’t telling anybody except their inner circle. The stories were hilarious, and sometimes ghastly with horrific details. Many had joined the military out of high school, so their worlds contrasted hugely, from hanging with high school friends, going to concerts, and playing on social media to desert sand, IEDs, and constant gunfire. They saw soldier friends destroyed. I’m not sure how a person recovers from that. Knowing these women opened my eyes to military service. They gave me a new world to respect, a world rich in story fabric and populated by strong, competent women. 

One day at the college, in 2011, a 20-something man opened fire at the intersection of Sunset and Vine. He shot at drivers in their cars and at passersby. Within minutes, pedestrians ghosted the streets. While my group and I were in no imminent danger—we sheltered in an office—I felt trapped. The reality of being “shot at,” of being helpless, terrified me. At one point, I looked through the blinds and saw the injured driver of a Mercedes. The man died later that day at the hospital. The entire event was unforgettable. At times I considered writing a memoir, but decided that being a reactive witness wasn’t much of a story, so a fictionalized account felt like a better fit.

Andrea: What problems or challenges did you encounter in revision? How did you resolve them?

Elaine: I intentionally built this story with action swirling around a heartbreak center. Tracy is in constant motion: she bumps into things, she breaks things, and sometimes she’s broken. My biggest challenge in revision was controlling the pacing and how fast things might go. Tracy flies on her skateboard, but when does she touch or savor? I eventually used alternating rhythms to slow her down in places so the reader could learn more about her. She slows down when she reminisces about Duarte, Sam Shepard, her high school antics, and also, when she mourns her mother. 

When transitions between scenes didn’t work, it was usually because I’d overlooked creating a segue to allow a shift in tempo. I had to rewrite those bridges a few times, so that the pacing carried the story rather than dulled it. A big question, too, was how much detail to show during the climactic fight, such as the duration of their physical contact with the shooter. In drafts where the time ballooned, the scene lost its momentum. Eventually I condensed the fight scene to nine lines. To elicit a visceral response from the reader, I tried to use sharp visual images and sensory details like smell and bodily reactions of spit and sweat. Though I trimmed certain words here and there, I kept most of it, because that section forms the true matrix of all that Tracy and her comrade Quibble had endured.

Looking back on my revisions, I indulged in a fair amount of experimentation, which was the most fun I’d had writing in a while. Also, by experimenting with the abstracts of voice and pace, I learned to work with emotional elements in a way that surprised me. I couldn’t ask for a better writing experience than that. 

The voices of these characters have stayed with me. I’m aware that a special charge has grown between Tracy and Quibble—I’m not sure what it will lead to, but I’ll explore that situation more in the next story of my Hollywood chronicle.

---

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Writing Tips.