Finding the Form with David Kary

“Growth Potential” started with some ideas bubbling in my head around 2018. I’d been drawing a salary for over twenty years by then, and I’d come to appreciate a few things about the strange alchemy of the corporate workplace. The catalyst that would turn this bubbling mixture into something more was a mental image of an improbable leafy growth. It disturbed me, amused me, and wouldn’t go away. It naturally led to a “what if” question, and I was off and running.

As I filled out the plot, getting a sense of what worked and what didn’t, I realized that I was dipping into a magic realist bag of tricks—suppressing my explanatory impulses, leaving plenty of room for the reader’s imagination, and injecting hyperrealistic details that made the deeply improbable seem ordinary. I found it surprising at first that a high-tech workplace suited this genre so naturally. Then I remembered Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and things started to make more sense.

My realizations about genre probably didn’t help me in writing the story so much as explain things after the fact. What did help, more than anything, was finding the right starting point. For far too long, I began the story with Lowell waking up to discover his leafy affliction. That wasn’t working. A more experienced writer would have probably recognized the problem a lot sooner than I did, but I got there eventually—there wasn’t enough in the plot to sustain such a long progression. I finally decided to begin the story later in the day, when his affliction came to light, and the difference was striking. The story felt tighter and more fit for purpose, which gave me a much-needed boost of confidence.

Finding the right end point was much easier. Lowell’s early morning hallucination, like his affliction, came to me as an intact vision, and once it arrived I never doubted that it belonged. It embraced the inevitable but also raised questions, fitting with my intuition that Lowell was yearning for more than money or status. What exactly? I don’t know, but it’s worth thinking about.