Author Note: Mark Budman

Mark Budman is the author of the short story “The Roads We Choose: A Social Media Mystery in Four Acts,” which appeared in The Ex-Puritan Issue 43: Fall 2018. As part of our Author Note series, he explains some of the influences behind the work.

Most writers don’t create their protagonists from scratch. Doing so would produce an automaton, not a human. The writers based them on a real life persona. I’m not an exception. I base my protagonists on a real persona closest to me: myself. It’s not a mirror reflection, of course. My protagonists are not the same from story to story. I take some part of my being, twist it, enhance it, make it worse, make it invisible, vulnerable, male or female, young or old, smart or stupid. I make them into something I might have been if I were born in a different country, in a different universe, in a different time. Many of my stories start from a dream I had, or, very rarely, a nightmare. I’m fairly optimistic. Though life can and often is tough, I don’t believe in horror.“ The Roads We Choose: A Social Media Mystery in Four Acts” is a suite of interconnected flash fiction stories about a single contrarian in different reincarnations. He’s inquisitive, vulnerable but optimistic. He’s me the way I would have been under different circumstances, or the way I imagine I would have been. Contrarians are fighters against the status quo. They are unsung heroes, they have courage to say the truth however bitter it might be. To be a contrarian is especially tough today. Today’s environment requires absolute adherence to orthodoxy. There are no shades of gray. You can’t question the orthodoxy or you’d be crucified on social media. You can’t even ask questions. If you ask, it means you are in doubt. If you are in doubt, it means you are not 100 percent with us. If you are not 100 percent with us, you are an enemy. But I must ask questions. I hate conformity. I hate exclamation points. I am a Question Mark. So are my favourite characters. And we get our fair portion of kicks because of that. I love linguistic experiments, plays on words, and intellectual depth. I want my stories to be layered. The top layer has to be universally accessible, but if the inquisitive readers dig deeper, they will discover additional meanings. It’s hard to do it in a flash story because of the word limit, but sometimes a limitation leads to a burst of creativity. When you are cornered, you fight harder. This particular suite has all four stories connected not only thematically and linguistically, but also through the characters infiltrated from the previous story. I found this approach tightens the overall piece. I hope this suite will enhance the reader’s understanding of the world. If that happens, it would mean that I didn’t summon my four-in-one protagonist out of non-existence for nothing.

Mark Budman was born in the former Soviet Union, and English is a second language for him. His writing appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, Five Points, Guernica/PEN, American Scholar, Huffington Post, World Literature Today, Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, The London Magazine (UK), McSweeney's, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of the flash fiction magazine Vestal Review. His novel My Life at First Try was published by Counterpoint Press.