Show All You Want

A Conversation with Bodie Fox

The first word that comes to mind for me when you mention Bodie Fox’s fiction is honesty. That might be a bit paradoxical up front, but in reading Bodie’s work, I find many people experience a definition of honesty that stems exclusively from stories drafted from deep, interior wells of sincerity. The truth of all fiction can be found somewhere in there—in those written people like Linda and Ricky, who you will never meet outside of the page, but will carry in your heart, always.

I’ve read Bodie’s work everywhere from Mayday to X-R-A-Y. It’s been a pleasure engaging with his longform and workshop submissions over the years at George Mason’s MFA program, and even more of a pleasure to speak with him a little about his process, and the creation of Get Back On, If You Fall.

Connor Harding: To start us off, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the story's inspiration. What all went into discovering the starting line of Get Back On, If You Fall?

Bodie Fox: That's a really fun question to start with. It was a lot of things at the time—this was my first year of grad school when I wrote it, and I had a couple friends at the time who were talking about collaborative projects, and one of them was talking about a movie script. And I was like, you know, it would be fun to write a screenplay for something. At the time, I was watching a lot of reality TV, and I feel like I can name a few TV shows that are fictionalized versions of making movies, but you don't really see movies about making a TV show, so I thought that would be a fun idea. And my then-girlfriend, (now fiancé’s) mom, when I met her, said oh, I've done this rodeo before, and I just thought that was so funny. I was like—oh, what if we had a character who walked around pretending to be a cowboy, but he kept saying, “I've done this rodeo once before”, or some variation of “this isn't my first rodeo”.

CH: That’s incredibly funny.

BF: And that stuck with me, but the idea never really got off the ground until I was in a haunted fictions class. A class on ghost stories and stuff. And we had a prompt. I don't remember what it was, but it was about an object, and… I mean, I couldn't think of a real ghost story, so I was just gonna write one about love instead. What I wrote was the 400 words where Linda sends off the tape. Originally, it was a VHS tape that she was gonna mail in. I don't know what it was. That moment, she just popped as a character in this kind of experimental writing I was doing. I had to read it out loud to the class, which is embarrassing. I hate reading my stuff aloud. Then everybody encouraged that it was funny, and I should just keep going. So, I did. Again, there was something in that moment of her sending it—it felt so tender and desperate that I found it incredibly interesting. It made me say I want to see what happens. That’s where the amalgamation of things came from.

Oh, and I was watching a copious amount of reality TV, and still do.

CH: Good for the soul, you know?

BF: Yeah, I love it. I know a lot of people consider it trash TV, and of course, sometimes I do watch it that way, but I find it really compelling as a genre. I watch it intently, and with a very intense lens. I'm analyzing it as we're getting these establishing shots of different things, and plot lines, and I'm tracking it all as I take it in. It’s fun, there's always the questions of well, is this really them? That keeps me endlessly entertained.

CH: Oh, absolutely. My partner and I watched, I think, a collective sum of 32 hours of Love Island this year. All that time, we were collectively deciding when/if the editor was slandering one individual person for entertainment purposes. There’s just so much going on, all of the time. People call it trash, but surprise, surprise, trash contains a million stories all within a single bag, so you better get digging, you know?

BF: Yeah, oh man. That's one of my favorite things, is when you watch it enough, and you can start to learn the editor's preferences. So, you have the question of the character versus the person versus the editing, and also how the showrunners are manipulating it. It's fascinating. Is 32 hours all of the current season of Love Island?

CH: I hazard to say it's a third of it, maybe? My girlfriend gave up on it before I did. There's one character that I couldn't let go of for a while, but yeah, I think eventually… I don't know. It just felt like being at an uncomfortable house party, so we just bailed. But until then, we were locked in.

BF: An uncomfortable house party. I love the way you phrased that. My fiancé and I also watched a ton.  I'd never seen Love Island, and then I had surgery in July and was confined to the couch for two weeks. I watched the entire newest season and it was… It was something. Again—an uncomfortable house party is a good word for it.

CH: Here's hoping the show helped the healing process. But this is also an excellent transition point into our next subject.

Talking about reality TV, in both actual shows and the literature that examines/critiques them, I feel there's an inherently rich parasocial connection that a reader or a viewer can't help but nurture with people who “play themselves” on the set of dating shows. In that way, the act of being an involved observer becomes the kind of heart of the experience. So, when you were writing Linda, For Get Back On, If You Fall, how did you work to navigate the borderlands that exist between a character that is incredibly invested in the events happening on those shows without being where the action's actually happening?

BF: It's tricky to answer the way that it's framed, because I think it's really natural for a story/context like this. It's reality TV, you know? Something's always happening. They have the challenges, and every episode they have their own individual plot arcs, and there's things that the characters do—there's drama, there's tension. It’s exciting. So I think, naturally, that would be the place to set a story, though I ultimately chose not to.

And I think that's a lot of advice you see about short stories out there. “something's gotta happen. A lot of fiction falls flat because it's just people sitting around talking about, like, emotions.” But to me, I lean towards Linda, because she feels like where the real emotional danger is. I understand that the action feels like it's happening where the show is being filmed, but to me, I was much more fascinated with Linda’s situation, because she felt like where the action was at. Again, she's the one in real emotional danger here, she has stakes. For Ricky, everything felt like a win-win, and I think that's why the thoughts I had about centering it with him didn't take off. Because he's a dreamer. He wants to go on this TV show. He wants people to know him. Even if he's mistaken about how much they actually get paid, which is not a ton, unless you win. Regardless, he still gets on TV, people still know him, and then either he wins, and he gets a bunch of money, and probably ends up in a relationship that he can invest more into. Or he loses, he's still known, then he comes home, and Linda's there. I was more interested in the people you're choosing to leave behind. How do they deal with that? The people who know the real you?

As I mentioned, I love the back and forth of is it them? Is it the character of themselves that they're playing? Is it turned up to eleven? And how do the people at home navigate that when they know the real you? And everything's at stake for Linda. So for me, that's really where the action was. Whenever Ricky's gone and the story seems slow, I felt that was really nice, because as the author, that becomes great real estate to build up the loop time of the story and make it feel like there's a ton of relationship here at stake.

CH: Especially when thinking about the idea of emotional danger, I completely see the viewpoint being best presented through the lens of Linda. Ricky's perspective is totally a win-win. He seems so aloof in so many different ways that, in the world of this long-tenured relationship, there's only one heart left beating a little faster through the act of his leaving.

My next question for you actually relates more back to Linda and Ricky as a couple. When reading through Get Back On, If You Fall, my favorite part about their relationship is the raw rapport that the two have built over the ten-plus years that they've been together. A specific highlight I love is when Linda sasses Ricky by repeating whatever he just said back to him in the third person. I found that incredibly charming. So next, I had a general question about character building. It's about how you design idiosyncrasy into your characters. When you have two very kinds of particular people, how do you help to imbue them with their own sense of being? And then how do you have them interact to have their idiosyncrasies build off each other and create that kind of special rapport?

BF: This one I'm going to struggle a little bit to answer, because a lot of these questions, are very craft-centered, which I think a ton about in other people's work, but not so much my own. And it always feels so noble to hear/say the “if you think about it too much, it'll lose the magic, you can't do it.” And so I have always somewhat looked away. I just really love when people talk and seeing how they express themselves in various ways—and I would like to just put that on the page. I grew up around working-class people who…I mean, the things they say would be insane, and they would have these really incredible vocal tics, and I just enjoy trying to work that out in a story.

Because for one, then you get to see it. Everybody says, show don't tell, and then I don't have to over-explain everything. Like oh, this is why they do this or this. But if you just see them, how they behave, then you're getting a lot of work done quicker, and if they say something really esoteric or unexpected, that tells you something about them, too. I think that's a fun way to do it, and I think conversation is ripe to fill those idiosyncrasies, like doing the third-person thing. It's a challenge for me, because obviously you don't want everything to speak to each other, and you don't want it to be too direct, and so I play this game where I see just how much I can get away with. Can I cut it to half of what I think I need? Or how esoteric can I make it before they sound insane and nobody knows what's happening? I think it’s interesting to visualize it in that way, and think about if different characters want different things, and if we keep marching ourselves in different directions, then what’s the craziest thing they can say before we gotta reel it back in, or conversations get a bit ridiculous, or clearly the two characters are not talking about the same thing (and even they should realize it).

CH: I completely understand idiosyncrasy itself is hard to explain and tackle, just because people are the way they are sometimes. But I think there's a very beautiful point in being made—that sometimes you have to push that extreme, or see how far you could take it, and then trim back to find where the kind of core of that idiosyncrasy belongs. Everyone's a little strange. I think pushing that strangeness and drawing it back is an excellent way to temper it’s wildest tendencies.

Bodie: Yeah, I think so too. And also, I think having those idiosyncrasies and throwing what you can onto the page, then later taking out what doesn't stick, and just having things in there that are enigmatic, inevitably gives depth. Even if it doesn't, you still get a sense like, oh, this is a person, and they have their own quirks. I think it gives that impression, because you can't fully know a person, can't fully know a character, and even if they have those idiosyncrasies, that speaks to that nature. And it makes you scratch your head. Why do they do that, or why would they say that? There's something more there. That's also part of how I think about it.

CH: Yeah, no, thank you. That's great. For the next question, I'm going to alter it just a bit, and mention something you brought up a little bit earlier—that the idea of the screenplay was very present in your mind when you were writing the groundwork for this piece. It's very different in my mind for short stories, where the camera points when it comes to things like exposition and interiority and the physical machinations of plot. So, with that more cinematic lens you had in mind for this work, did that change how you were designing your scenes physically on the page?

BF: No, not really. I do it mostly the same way every time, and it's not the most efficient way, but it gets it done. I always try to set myself up with a really nice telling sentence. Just gives immediate context, immediate stakes. I think that this story starts off telling us they're doing this thing. It's not her idea, she never has ideas. And I like to use that as a grounding point, which then creates the potential for the emotional arc, because we can kind of see how that gets challenged, and then asserted or subverted later. And I think that's really important, because you can show all you want, but unless you have the context, it's really not going to mean anything. In Steve Almond's book, Truth is the Bow, Mercy's The Arrow, he writes about that, you know, and I think it's really compelling how he explains it.

So usually, I start with a good tell, a sentence or two to really set up the context. And then I think through the lens of a camera and write out the scene. I have a bad habit of staying laser-focused in-scene, and not moving enough into interiority, or showing their reactions, or doing their backstory. And sometimes I'll remember—oh, crap, I gotta add this in. This can't be all just scene. No wonder I'm struggling to know where to go next, because, really, I should go backwards or further in. Usually then, in multiple passes, I do a ton of revising and a ton of rewriting to add more. Because it's never my instinct. My drafts are always super light on interiority and backstory the first few go-arounds. Get Back On, If You Fall is twenty-seven pages, double-spaced. The first draft was twelve. I had to add a lot back into it.

It takes a lot of time, but then it helps me get well-attuned to the timing of the piece, because I'm trying to balance live time with the reader's real time, the reader's attention, and then the story’s time as it takes place, so even though I'm having to do all of this extra work on the back end—and maybe this is just self-diluting and trying to make myself feel better about it— there's some sort of real benefit for me, instead of a bunch of needless work. I'm having to do a ton of rereading and a ton of redrafting to add everything back in, and that makes me more attuned.

So when I draft, I use the scene primarily as the vehicle to get to the end of the story, and then I go back in, add the interiority, add the backstory. Then and only then is really when I start thinking about plot. Like, okay—this is our emotional arc. I use plot mostly as a way to push us through. the gates, and the doors, and the hoops, whatever vehicle you use for that. It’s funny you point out that it started as a movie idea. I feel like this is one of my most tightly plotted stories, thinking about beats. And that feeling didn't happen until very late in the process.

CH: The point you bring up about the name that's given to the vehicle is something that's always super interesting to me. People talk a lot about the story within the story, the aboutness, the core, the heart—whatever term you want regarding meaning-making that we use in the pursuit of writing good fiction. But I feel situating that it's not always the same engine, and also presenting your own through the raw feeling that you get at the end of the story, that emotional arc you pursue—there's universality in that.

BF: All roads lead to Rome, just a matter of which ones you choose, and the turns you pick, I guess.

CH: The next question I have for you is about a literary device that is very near and dear to my heart, and that I noticed very actively in your work, and that you've already mentioned once—which is the use of centralized object and motifs. You mentioned before that one of the first centralized objects, or just objects that existed within the story, was the VHS tape, but other ones that I've come to have close to my heart are the cactus and the scrap jug, which I felt weirdly attached to. A myriad of others pop up across the narrative as well. So my question for you, or more of a prompt, is to talk a little bit more about how you integrate patterns and objects into your stories. Specifically, if those parts of the story fall into that later process of revision, like you were talking about before, or if objects have a special home in the creation of those emotional arcs during early drafts.

BF: I’m really glad to know that the scrap jug resonated with you. My great grandma had one that she kept in her kitchen window, and it was disgusting. And then every morning and every afternoon, she'd take it out and put it in a barrel to burn with compost and other scraps and stuff. I don't know why I was thinking about it when I wrote this story. I think it's incredibly less common than I thought as a child it would be. Now that I'm an adult, nobody's got scrap jugs. But she did. To the question, there's a few ways I've come to it. When I first started writing seriously, I didn't really know how to end a story, and I had a mentor tell me—he called it a hook—and basically it's just an object that shows up at the beginning, it takes on this emotional resonance, and then you end on it. To show the passage of time and stuff.

Those things still take up a lot of space in my work. One, because I just enjoy things, and what they say about a person. Their things sort of imply their existence, and what value. We live in an economy that also just values things, you know? Well, in my life, if I feel miserable, let me have a Coke, I'll feel better for ten minutes. Or a cup of coffee. So yeah, I just love things, and when I'm drafting, keeping in mind that idea of the hook and the emotional resonance, I tend to just throw everything but the kitchen sink into a story. Whatever's just on my mind at the time happens to wind its way in. And at the time of the story, it was this physical manifestation of a VHS tape that she was gonna mail off, though later that became a video clip. There's the cactus, which I think at the time, my sister had just given me a fake cactus. It really had no reason other than that. And for whatever reason, the scrap jug showed up. They just wound up there, because those were the things that were on my mind.

From there, as I better identify, the emotional arc of the story, and I'm coming back through everything and rewriting, I tend to do a lot of my revision from memory. Whatever sticks is the stuff that's gonna be the most memorable to me. Those images that come back up feel the most emotionally resonant, and then I clean them up and make them a good landing place for those emotions. I mean, it's so hard to talk about those things, and so I feel like an object is a nice vehicle to drive those ideas through the plot. Plus, they're great for time management, right? Again, if we're thinking about good fiction, it’s managing kind of a clock. It's a great way to express the lived time of your characters, the characters' time in the story, and make those things feel like they're passing, through various versions of an image or object. Seeing those patterns play out in different ways lets the reader feel that a little bit more.

CH: That absolutely makes sense. I think a lot of people don't give much credit to the way interactivity with objects affects their life. Even from an outside perspective, when the reader looks in and they see an object that's very important to a character, it is then immediately subscribed to some core ideology, or as metaphor for a grander concept. But I think at the same time, just allowing it to be a touchpoint for a character’s lived experience is also a very tangible manifestation. We are not strictly metaphorical beings, and so I think that having a multifaceted view of how objects are used is the one that—I don't know—equates the best to fiction and in life, or at least I hope so.

BF: Thank you for saying it that way, I think that was really lovely. As an English teacher, I see this on the daily. We see an object, and it is a symbol, or it is a metaphor. And as an English teacher, that's where my students' heads often go. But as a writer, I'm always like, I don't know, let's think about the character. What does this tell us about the character? What is this kind of person valuing here? What does that let us know?

CH: Of course. I really appreciate your methodology. I taught In The Penal Colony one time. Worst mistake of my life. We didn't make it past metaphorical objects for the first 60% of the class. We lacked physicality, we lacked the kind of granular, pragmatic use of objects, so I appreciate your approach to it from multiple layers.

BF: But also, as a writer, in my classes, I will sometimes argue: but really aren't all of these things just metaphors for feeling I don't know how to express? So here's this object that expresses it, or here's this short story that might make you feel the same way.

CH: That just leaves me with one more question for you, and thankfully, I think we get to depart from the load-bearing craft conversation and shift more to a personal space in connection to your work. You’re originally from Georgia, right?

BF: Yeah, yeah, please. A very Georgia-centric story.

CH: I just wanted to ask you a little bit about what goals you set for yourself when you are writing about a place that you come from, or a place that you love. What steps do you take to guarantee its authentic presentation?

BF: I honestly don't know. I don't ever sit down and say I want to represent this place in this one way. I think a lot of it has to do with me being from Georgia. I understand that it is the place that shaped me, and the place that has shaped the people who've also influenced me. Pretty much everything I write is set there, or at least starts as being set there in my mind. Because it's about trying to better understand myself, and if I can represent it and externalize these different parts of it, then maybe I can better understand my own self in that regard. So that's really all that I'm thinking about whenever writing setting.

Though I do think it's interesting, especially since it's a story about reality TV, and we've only touched on that marginally, how place or cultures are represented, and how things get profitized in reality TV. Companies that are trying to sell us things—will take culture and then ship it out to a larger audience, and then it very quickly gets reduced. I think the South is an example of that. So I think it's also good, while it helps me better understand myself, just presenting it how I experienced it growing up without tailing too far into overblown stereotypes of the South, or from Southern fiction.

Like any writer, you find something that speaks to you, and then you want to recreate it a bunch. I had success with some earlier stories that were authentic and truer to me, but then because of that, I didn't understand really what made those stories charming. And I thought, oh, it's because they're Southern, so then I started to make more ridiculous versions, or tropey and stereotypical. I think Kevin Wilson wrote in the forward to the re-release of Gospel Singer about a lot of Southern writing becoming an unmitigated pone, and that's kind of what I was doing—because it really wasn't authentic or specific to me and my experience, which is Rome, Georgia. And that's really all I aim to do—capture how I view the place, and how it shaped me.

CH: An unmitigated pone is an insanely cool phrasing, by the way. I have one last goofy question for you, if you have the time. What percentage DNA of each reality show do you think went into the design of Get Back On, If You Fall? Was this, like, a Bachelorette-coded show to you? What third eye into the reality TV cosmos did you open while you were recovering from that surgery?

BF: Part of also the inspiration was, what if Bachelor, but they were cowboys? And clearly, that's kind of the structure that it's drawn on. The Bachelorette with cowboys and ex-rodeo stars. And then, in addition—have you ever watched the show Farmer Wants a Wife?

CH: I have seen murmurs of it on social media. I've never taken the dive.

BF: That one is… well that's a show. A horrible, awful show. I try to watch that one as intensely as the others, But that one's tough! There's like five cowboys, or farmers, who—I feel very strongly—are only somewhat cowboy. They've got ranches that they inherited from their families, or didn't really grow up on a farm, or their grandpa has this farm, or they're a truck driver, but they happen to have a lot of land. Only very few of the men cast feel very authentic, And I could be wrong. I don't mean to be judgmental—this is just the impression I get from the set. I would love to know I was wrong. The whole premise is they're gonna date. They go and they pick five women, they do these micro-speed dating sessions, then those five women live at their farm for two months and just do labor. They're baling hay, they're cleaning stalls, they're brushing down the horses, they're pinning cow ears, it's, and that's all they do for, like, two months!

CH: Sounds awfully romantic to me.

BF: Yeah, totally. And off the merits of that, they decide if they would make a good wife one day. Do you want kids? And then at the end, on at a lot of these shows, you're gonna get married, you get engaged, you win this prize. For Farmer Wants a Wife, the whole prize is that they take the lucky lady out into this field, put down blankets, and there's a sunset, and they say: you wanna go steady with me? And that's it. It just culminates in a steady relationship. Boyfriend/Girlfriend, that's all. It's ridiculous, and I love it, but even for reality TV standards, that one is something. So that one made its way in. Although I will say, season one has an unexpected emotional arc for one of the men that is really quite entertaining. He does a lot of serious reflection by the end. And oh my god, is it genre-bending. He's doing emotional work I wasn't expecting! This is so great! So that went into it, too.

And then, Love is Blind. Love is Blind is really the one I'm constantly fascinated by, more than any other. Around the time I wrote this story was when I first watched it. I've seen season two onward. And it's always that question again: Well, is this really them? Is this not them? Is this a character they're playing? Are they here for love, like the show implies? Are they here for clout? Because now you've become a c-list celebrity by going on the show. I enjoy watching it, because the contestants are always like Oh my god, you love Christmas? I love Christmas. We're meant to be together on this dating show that we both applied to be on, because we want to be famous!

And I like to make fun of it, but I also know in my heart of hearts that I do that, too. I love to be in love, and I think the story gets into that with the ending. I'm always fascinated by how these things apply and happen in my real life, but I also enjoy watching and poking fun at it on TV. Because it's TV. Because I don't know them, and it's larger than life. But really, the thing that made this story click, is in a much later season of Love is Blind. A man goes on named Trevor. I don't remember, much else. Everybody loves Trevor. Trevor seems great, and he's really in love, and he's got this bracelet, the woman he's dating, I think her name is Chelsea, gives him. And later, everybody's like, oh my god, why didn't that work out? He seems like such a great man. And he comes on the reunion and it turns out the whole time he had a girlfriend. The whole time he was on the show, there's somebody else he had been telling he loved, and how he was gonna come back for them, and he'd said this the day before he went on the show.

That cracked open the story again for me. That was when it doubled in length. I was like, oh my god, what does that look like? What drives a person to want to be on TV so bad that you'll throw away this life you've built with someone else, but then also still try to maintain it, because you don't want to lose everything? Because you want to have your cake and eat it, too?

CH: I'd never heard of that first show that you mentioned. Was it Farmer Wants a Wife? The way you described that sounds like they were hiring, they're not dating, you know?

BF: That was actually part of the research for the story. I applied to be on it…partially, I didn't finish the application. Not to be the farmer, but one of the women's applications and what that looked like. I filled it out for the most part. I was curious. What are the things they ask you? I eventually drew on that for the application scene, right from their website.

CH: That’s some innovatively insane in-depth research to do. I feel strongly there’s a contingent of fiction right now that is very interested not only in reality TV, but in, the fixings that surround it, like in those applications. I remember reading that they have people isolate in a hotel room for an extended period of time before they stay on Love is Blind, which sounds mentally draining. But also, to quantify or qualify what makes somebody worthy of chasing fame on, a character-based international television show, putting them through quizzical challenges and application forms, feels particularly insane.

BF: It’s crazy stuff they have to do just to go on TV. My instincts would be that the process is simple. You fill out an application, they choose it, you go. But it’s a lot more than that.

CH: I think that that loops back around towards the beginning of our conversation. Reality TV is seen as trash, but within it, there exists intricate and precise production. There’s framing of circumstances, and of people’s surrounding lives, the curation of characters that they choose to present as and not present as. Finding authenticity in that is a task both daunting, and by its very nature, esoteric to the viewer.

But in Get Back On If You Fall, choosing that lens of Linda, by which we get to experience that million dollar phrase that you said earlier, just specifically the emotional danger, when that veil of the parasocial is lifted, and when you are forced to engage with that danger as the person partaking in the story, I think something really special happens, where you are not part of that system as intended. That feels real. I don't know if I said that quite right, but all this is just to say, I think that Get Back On If You Fall is hitting at a point of Reality TV that you don't see very often, and I think you've done a very exceptional job of making all of the unreality that goes into it serve a very human practice.

BF: Well, thank you. I think that's really kind of you to say. And I think that's why we love both stories, and also reality TV. That search for authenticity, being able to recognize ourselves in some capacity, even if it's only through the conceit of reality—and in hoping that that's what it was, once we’ve seen it.