Dry
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Neal Shusterman on Dry
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A son’s concept, a state running dryThe collaboration had a test run before it had a name. Neal and Jarrod co-wrote a story for the Unwind Dystology anthology ‘UnBound’ in 2015, and what came out of that experience was not just a finished story but an appetite for a larger project together. The concept that became ‘Dry’ arrived from Jarrod’s side of the table.
I think that our story was one of the best in the book, and we wanted to work on something else together. Jarrod came up with the concept of a society in which critical services are about to be shut off, and the pieces of Dry began coming together. In California, we are constantly dealing with drought, and the possibility of the state running out of water has become frighteningly close. So that got us thinking about what could happen if so many millions of people were struggling to survive without water.
Jarrod did not have to imagine the scenario from scratch. About halfway through the manuscript, Cape Town, South Africa, was approaching what city officials called ‘Day Zero,’ the point at which municipal water would be cut to residents and redirected to essential services. The book’s equivalent moment, the ‘Tap-Out,’ was already written.
When we were about halfway through the book, we started hearing about the critical water shortage in Cape Town, and that the city was approaching the point where water would be shut off to residents and redirected to critical service. In Cape Town, it’s called ‘Day Zero,’ and in Dry we call it the ‘Tap-Out,’ but the parallels are creepy.
Then the research became personal. In September 2017, Neal and Jarrod were in Savannah, Georgia, visiting family when Hurricane Irma made landfall. Store shelves emptied of bottled water. Jarrod described what it meant for the book to suddenly have authors who had felt the same shortage their characters were living through.
When we couldn’t find any water to buy, we had to get into an evacuation mindset. We were actually living through a similar experience as our characters, which helped us understand and convey their actions and emotions.
That evacuation mindset, the gap between knowing intellectually that water can run out and feeling the specific fear of it, runs through the novel’s early chapters, where ordinary Southern California life tips into crisis faster than anyone expects.
How he wrote it
Writing toward a screen that hadn’t been built yetThe synthesis is candid: there are no available interviews in which either author walks through how viewpoints were divided, what research the book required, or how the manuscript was revised. What comes through instead is a consistent description of the prose itself. When ‘Dry’ sold its film rights to Paramount in a six-studio bidding war, Neal explained why the transition from page to script felt less like a leap and more like a continuation.
We both write very visually, so as we work on the script, it’s relatively easy to imagine what the movie might look like.
That visual quality showed up again when Neal described the experience of writing the screenplay. For a father-son team adapting their own novel, the usual losses of adaptation, the scenes that don’t survive, the subtext that can’t be filmed, apparently did not define the process.
This is one of those rare instances where the script just about wrote itself. Adaptation can be very difficult, but this one was a dream!
Jarrod’s account of the same process points to something specific about co-authoring a book and then returning to it as a screenwriter: the source material is not a text you consult but one you carry.
It’s a joy to adapt something that’s your own, and to reimagine the story. It’s quite a seamless process — after all, we have the book memorized.
What he wants us to sit with
Denial as the real disasterBy the time ‘Dry’ published in October 2018, Jarrod had spent months watching the cities named in the book’s background research appear in actual drought coverage. His assessment of that convergence was not reassuring.
Unfortunately, Dry is becoming more and more relevant every day. It seems there’s always a freak typhoon, earthquake, or drought. And when it comes to drought, Cape Town isn’t alone. São Paulo, Beijing, Moscow, and even Mexico City might tap-out next. It’s terrifying when fiction becomes reality.
Neal’s framing of the same moment was darker still. Where Jarrod emphasized the book’s widening relevance, Neal questioned whether a cautionary tale can function once the cascade it warns against has already started.
When we wrote Dry, we knew it was timely, but we didn’t realize how timely it would be. It’s a cautionary tale, but I fear it’s too late to stop the cascade of events the book warns against. Even so, we need to be vigilant and be aware of what could happen. I think denial is the enemy of a sensible response.
That concern with denial connects to something Neal has said about why he writes crisis fiction at all. In a Simon and Schuster Q&A, asked about stories that push readers to think differently about real-world problems, Neal described an approach that resists the urge to resolve what it raises.
It comes from seeing problems in the world, and not knowing the answers. I think one of the biggest problems we face as a society is posing simplistic answers to very complicated problems. Once we do that, we become a part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. The goal is to find unique ways of posing the questions, and maybe even posing questions that we haven’t thought to ask, with the hope of creating a broader perspective — so that the answers we come up are more thoughtful and nuanced.
For a book whose authors worry the warning has already outrun the audience’s ability to act, this is not a modest ambition. It asks readers to resist easy conclusions even when the scenario on the page feels like a conclusion in itself.