A Work in Progress

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before (I read enough of my own writing without going back through previous posts), but I currently have six novels at some stage of my writing process. With dedicated posts to The Road Cain Walks and Southern Ouroboros and a passing mention of a completed first draft of The Inseparable, I’ve now covered half of my works in progress.

This is a good time to put a thick red circle around the year I prematurely self-published Southern Ouroboros. It was 2019, specifically the last half of the year. The historians out there will see the storm gathering on the horizon, a reference point that changed so much for so many people. But in late 2019, the biggest problem I faced was deciding what to write next.

I’ve accumulated enough story ideas to make this part of the process easy. Writing produces a special kind of creative energy. Some writers lament this on their social media outlet of choice. Ideas creep in, begging for your attention, drawing your focus like a siren song pulling ships to their ruin. According to my project file, I have 63 story ideas waiting to be told, though some of these are destined to be reduced to plot points. There’s no way I’ll live long enough to write that many novels.

So how do I choose which comes next? As with Southern Ouroboros, by this point, I’ve usually been turning some idea over in my mind, spinning its threads into fabric. In the time it takes me to finish a novel, balancing it with my other obligations of paying work and family, I’ve already bounced between a few ideas. Once I’ve developed each into at least a three-act structure (Introduction, Rising Action [Climax], Falling Action), I move on to the next. When it’s time to choose one, I pick the one I’ve developed the farthest—the seed most ready to be planted.

The Birth of a Novel

In late 2019, the story lingering longest in my head was a result of two separate concepts that collided like atoms. One was a feeling, a daydream of leaving society behind to camp the rest of my life in the woods (a wife and daughter made this a passing fantasy but one that recurred with every long drive and household chore). The other was an idea of how to potentially solve the homeless problem. What if there were farms that offered free room and board in exchange for work, sharing their profits to help the unhoused get back on their feet? If nothing else, someone should do an experiment to see if it would work. They could even offer therapy sessions for those who struggle with mental health issues.

Those two ideas first came to me around 2016 and marinated over the next three years. The story they merged into is about a man who becomes fed up with society (specifically with my own personal grievances) and decides to leave it. He buys camping gear and heads into the woods to live the rest of his life there but catches the attention of some unhoused people, who follow him. Before he knows it, they’ve built their own commune and a society that feels a lot like a cult: one with him as its unwilling leader. 

I still kind of like that original idea. Always one to push myself into the blind spots, one of my writing goals is to touch as many genres as possible. This could have been my farce, my exaggeration of the world we live in to point out some weighty truth. But I couldn’t find a way around the establishment of the society/cult. Those things don’t come readymade, so I would have to build them myself and in detail. The other half of “write what you know” is “fake what you don’t,” and I don’t think I could have bullshitted my way through that one.

My solution was to have the main character instead find his way to an already existing commune—a much easier path. A reader wouldn’t expect him to notice every single detail, especially not how the minor aspects of the place were implemented and why. It allowed me to introduce elements I wanted to highlight organically and with the believable detail of an outsider. With that settled, I got to work.

I finished the first draft within six months and gave it the tentative title Shine until someone in the first round of feedback said it was too simple. The current working title is Shadow on the Sun, but it might change again before it sees the light of day. I’m sure I’ll post about it again at some point in this website’s future, but I just want to note that the clock of that pre-COVID world was ticking as I set the novel aside to cool. Everything was about to change. I was about to change. Life influences art and vice versa.

That’s all for now. See you next time.