15 | Start out chuckling

February 9, 2018, from my blog:

At the end of 2017, I had finished the draft of [The Quiet is Loud], and was feeling kind of lost … so I dipped back into something I had started years earlier. In 2012, Readers’ Digest invited people to submit their ultra-short stories on Twitter. One of my submissions was published, and I took this little snippet and started writing a story. I examined the small amount of actual narrative I’d written for the short story, and realized that I couldn’t go on – I hadn’t figured out how the magic system in this world worked. I didn’t know what made these people leave Earth. And then – it was a spaceship. How many people lived in it? What did they eat? How did they get water? What jobs did people have? Who kept the peace? Was there peace?

September 18, 2018:

I'm currently in a weird Schrödinger's Cat stage of writing and not writing. If you were to look at my output, you would stagger backwards in horror. I have only written a few chapters, and I started this novel in January. Oof.

HOWEVER. The amount of research, worldbuilding, planning, and yes, even spreadsheets that I've been working on are much greater. I wrote my last novel in the space of a year, and that story flowed relatively easily from me. I had my framework, and I stuck to it fairly faithfully.

It was also smaller. My first novel after years of short stories, [TQIL] had a small cast of characters and a pretty straight-ahead plot. There was a bit of backstory to sort out, but that particular iceberg was modest. But with this novel, it feels like that Carl Sagan quote, "If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." There is always something to think about or figure out. And even if I account for the sort of research that is just writing avoidance, there's a lot. A couple of nights ago I put on my writing playlist, and sat staring at my screen with tented fingers for an hour. The only movements I made were to grab my calculator to figure out the age of a MC's great-great grandparent, or type out where they were born, in between long stretches of time where I just sat, and stared, and thought. Doris Lessing, with her love of wool-gathering, would have been proud.

August 25, 2019:

I love revisiting certain events or thoughts years later. It's always so interesting to hear how people have developed, or how their memories of things have evolved over time. I've written about this before, about the mutable nature of our memories and how easily they can be influenced. It's been showing up in my writing quite often over the past few years, and while it's never been a main theme, it's always there. Those of you who know how nostalgia-prone I can be are probably not surprised.

My current novel is set in a world where events of over eighty years ago are considered "prehistory" and the powers that be essentially influence what the collective memories are. Again, it's there in the background rather than at the forefront, but it's a part of my novel (and probably my writing as a whole) that I really enjoy writing about. I've been doing a lot of developmental work for this aspect of my book, so it's been at the front of my mind lately.