Bryan Washington on Road Trips and Friendship

"Experimentation, really: I'm still growing comfortable with the third person (too much power). While I was working on my upcoming novel, " Palaver, " which is in third person throughout, I needed ways to test narrative distance and uncertainty. Short stories serve as really useful vehicles for that kind of exercise. In this one, the question of whose voice the narrative belonged to-how much agency that voice held, and which tactics best used for both the specificity and the capacity for surprise regarding the piece's protagonists, without slowing the narrative down-was pretty challenging."

"But the narrative structure-a road trip-created forward motion by default, with a clear beginning and end, while allowing for malleability and emotional play. Having certainty for at least a handful of narrative junctures-whether in the form of a journey, an end-stopped event, or a clear period of time-provides for thematic flexibility and converging tangents, even if they don't feel immediately related to the subject at hand. Eventually, you're going to reach the place, or the event is going to happen, the year is going to end: whatever threads are untangled along the way are narrative, too, and can be internalized by the reader as such (although it's on the writer to make those connections as both firm and transparent as possible)."

Cali and Ronny, estranged college friends, drive from Houston to Los Angeles after Ronny's partner Sho dies. Narrative experimentation with third-person perspective tests distance, agency, and uncertainty to determine whose voice carries the story and how tactics shape specificity and surprise. Short stories function as compact vehicles for such experiments without the commitment of a novel. A road-trip structure supplies built-in momentum and clear temporal markers while permitting malleability and emotional play. Defined narrative junctures—journeys, end-stopped events, or fixed time periods—enable thematic flexibility and converging tangents, but the writer must make connections firm and transparent for readers.

Read at The New Yorker