Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos: One Word, Then Another 

The thought of beginning a work of fiction with the intention, “This will be a novel,” sort of terrifies me. When I started writing fiction after college in the early 1990s, I focused on the short story, which has remained my favorite fictional form. Yet, I like the challenge and what I see as the chutzpah and confidence of believing one has the creative energy to turn an impulse and a skeletal idea into an embodied narrative of many thousands of words.   

My most recent book and third published novel, Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, began as a few stand-alone but linked memos. A few days earlier, I had finished a more traditionally structured comedic novel, having written it in a feverish bout over a period of only a few months. By the time I wrote the last page, I was very tired but also feeling the sadness of having to part from the characters I’d created and lived with as I wrote about them over those intensive weeks.

After a couple of days off, I already felt at loose ends and ended up going back to my writing desk to start something new—maybe a short story, I thought, or an essay, if not another novel. I also wanted to continue writing comedic fiction, and this impulse compelled me to write the first memos that became Please Be Advised. The very first memo’s subject line, if I remember correctly, was “Workplace Decorum.”  

In graduate school, I was trained to teach undergraduate business writing courses as well as composition and rhetoric and creative writing courses. I liked the business writing courses quite a bit—the assignments were memos, resumes, cover letters, and practice job interviews—and these forms were teachable, on the whole, whereas trying to teach someone how to write a poem or a short story within a 10- or 15-week term was a dubious undertaking at best, as was purporting to grade a creative writing assignment with any degree of objectivity. (Basically, if you showed up to my classes, put your two or three cents in during workshop, and turned in the assignments on time, you were going to get an A—Bs and below went to students who skipped class or didn’t turn in assignments—most everyone did do the work.) 

When I went back to teaching as an adjunct instructor several years after finishing graduate school (my MFA was in poetry, but even then I knew I wanted to focus on writing fiction, but I needed to read and to live more first—i.e. I needed to figure out how to write about characters who were not stand-ins for me or people I knew, and how to pace and structure a story), initially I was offered comp and rhetoric courses, but soon I put in for the business writing courses, which were a lot more enjoyable to teach—less grading and much less awkward writing to wade through. 

The memo is a form I’ve always liked, and it’s a cousin of a poem, as I see it. Both forms’ compression appeals to me, and after I’d written the first few memos in what would become Please Be Advised, I kept going. I hoped I had the tone down—wry, seriocomic, irreverent, and soon after, individual characters began appearing. The first several memos were attributed to Lower Level, Mid Level, and Upper Level Management—a mask the actual author(s) could hide behind—this being a tactic corporations also make use of, especially when the memo is a “bad news” memo (“sensitive” memo was the euphemistic term of the textbook I used). What boss wants to sign their name to a memo that says layoffs are coming? The language of subterfuge some corporations employ when it comes to conveying pay cuts, firings, loss or trimming of benefits and other negative subjects, this was what I was interested in subverting and exploiting as I wrote Please Be Advised, as well as showing the overall lunacy I think more of us would exhibit in the workplace if we weren’t afraid of reprisals. 

Soon I was writing “Stories of Personal Triumph,” memos I penned in the voices of individual characters, e.g. Bobbie Kramer, Bill Dubonski, Jeff Snow, Ken Crickshaw Jr. Each was oversharing, some of these stories’ titles making clear their subjects too, and very few of them appropriate were for the office: “Male Stripper,” “The Night I Lost My Virginity,” “Frenemy,” “My Husband’s Wisdom Teeth,” “Wrong Number.”

The book had a 4 ½ year odyssey to publication. I showed it to my agent not long after I finished it (early 2018); he didn’t think it was enough of a novel yet. I went back and revised and added to it. Not long after, due to other reasons, we parted ways, and when I began working with another agent a few months later, she didn’t seem to know what to do with Please Be Advised and was more interested in a more traditional novel I was writing at the time. That novel didn’t sell the following year, and I started writing a different one, along with a few short stories. I kept doggedly persisting. This is my superpower, if I have one. A few years later, I placed Please Be Advised with Kurt Baumeister at 7.13 Books. 

He too is a novelist and I was his first author as an editor, and it was great fun to work with him. He shared my sense of humor, and I added more memos at his suggestion and punched up some of the jokes, and before long, we were talking about cover designs and figuring out how to spend the millions we’d soon be earning from this book. (Not really! But wouldn’t that be nice…)   

Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos was released on October 18, 2022, and it was one of Bookshop.org’s featured releases for that day (along with George Saunders’ Liberation Day—his stories are often so strange and funny and brilliant). I love this book. I wish we had more funny books out there—if you read it, I hope you’ll laugh so much you’ll annoy your husband (or wife or kids or spousal equivalent) with all your cackling, as one friend told me happened in her household. 

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Christine Sneed is the author most recently of Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, and The Virginity of Famous Men. Her third story collection, Direct Sunlight, will be published in June 2023. She is the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up, and her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New York Times, O Magazine, and other publications. She’s received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, among other honors and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She teaches for Northwestern University’s and Regis University’s graduate creative writing programs.

Find out more about her on her website https://www.christinesneed.com/

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/ChristineSneed

PLEASE BE ADVISED: A NOVEL IN MEMOS

Please Be Advised is award-winning author Christine Sneed’s bright, irreverent send-up of corporate America in the 21st century. Mixing cultural critique and formal inventiveness with wicked laughs and the sort of surrealistic mysteries only a novel about the corporate world could give us, Please Be Advised tracks the decline, fall, and possible resurrection of Quest Industries, one of the world’s foremost purveyors of collapsible, portable, and (occasionally) dangerous office machines.

Featuring a rogue’s gallery of corporate cogs from drunk, womanizing, and often-delusional CEO Bryan Stokerly, Esq. to his executive secretary, the brainy, libidinous Hannah Louise Schmidt and his soon-to-be-rival, new office manager and disgraced former coroner, Dr. Ken Crickshaw, Jr., Please Be Advised will leave you laughing at a work world more like our own than most of us would care to admit.

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