While I was at my recent writers retreat, I was having some trouble settling into work on my current project, which is a sequel to my fantasy novel For the Good of the Realm. I finally decided the best starting point was re-reading the parts of the book that I’ve already written (about 40,000 words). Doing that made me recognize why I was having trouble and will probably continue to have trouble: I am obsessed by things going on in the present.
I don’t just mean being an active participant in my society or my work at Unbreaking.org or even doomscrolling. It’s not just that I’m paying attention and trying to do my political part at a fraught time.
It’s that there’s so much stuff I want to think about and work out about what the future could and should look like, which is rooted in a lot of reading and writing I’ve been doing. Regular readers have probably noticed that I have a lot of thoughts related to so-called AI, but I’m also thinking a lot about climate change, wealth inequality, and how to change things so that we can live well on this planet.
It’s not like the novel is alien to this, for all that it’s a fantasy book in a non-technological reality, because there are things I’m doing there that will be relevant to the present.
But they’re indirect, as much of my best fiction is.
Part of the reason I don’t know how to write good fiction dealing with the realities that interest me right now – economic, technical, political – is that I’m still working out my take on it. I need to not only understand it; I need to internalize it. When I try to write directly about what I see around me, it often sounds polemical.
It’s better if I write essays about a lot of my ideas of the present, which will help me work them out so that they gradually emerge in my fiction.
Right now writing about anything else feels hard. We’re on such a precipice.
But I don’t want to stop writing this novel. I’ve got a lot invested in it and if I can just fix the messy middle, I know it’s going to be good.
I assume this means I’ll just have to keep on juggling and try to carve out more time – like the retreat – when I actually focus on the fiction.
It’s interesting to see what the problem is – not the problem with the novel (still working on that), but the problem with the writer – and maybe makes it easier to fix.
Maybe.
Pretty sure people who use chatbots to “write” their stories don’t have this problem. Of course, chatbots can’t internalize anything. They don’t have angst.
Fortunately, I’m well-stocked on angst.
I can see the essays leading you (and your readers) to understand possibilities for the future. It gives me hope that you and the people you’re reading are looking ahead to what the future “could and should look like.” Otherwise we are stuck in looking at problems that seem insurmountable.
How to manage this line of work alongside writing the sequel requires — I don’t know — two different sides of the brain?