The Next Starting Line

This week in writing, I finally got it in my head to start project #fellrunner. Which is to say, its due date is next in line, the end of this year.

Theoretically, that shouldn’t be hard. It’s 40,000 words, Micheal, how hard could it be? Especially coming off of a 200,000 word project.

But I am struggling to begin, much like I was way back when I started writing Warmongers (a year ago around this time, wow). Is it because I’m just coming off of a heavy writing jag (I wrote “the end” on Warmongers a few weeks ago), and the launch of two books, and all of my parents visiting for two weeks? That would shatter anyone’s brain space.

Or is it that starting any project is hard?

I know from long experience that I always struggle with any transition period in a work. Changing from project to project, brainstorming to drafting to revising.

This one, in particular, I jave had bouncing in my head for years, but only in the vaguest terms—“MC has to do a fell run to save ___.” And it was the first novella I had in mind when I got my deal with tordotcom. But it was too nebulous then, and so I moved to Fate’s Bane.

And now that it’s had all this time to coalesce…it’s still nebulous!

So it’s the kind of project I’m going to have to find a new way to pin down. Much like Warmongers, it isn’t responding well to my old strategies of outline. Perhaps because of the structural stretches I want to make.

There are, however, things I do know. I want to explore running, and try to make it narratively interesting. It will be a journey. In certain thematic ways, I want it to be the opposite of Fate’s Bane.

There are also things I thought I knew. For example, as I set to this week, I realized that the story as I’d envisioned it in my head over the last couple of years felt too much of a repeat of work I’ve already done. If I didn’t make a major change, it would be boring for me to write and maybe boring for folks to read.

So I decided to strike a character and that romantic line to see what other relationships and complications would pop up in its place. What tensions exist without romance as the main motor.

I may also have to relinquish another aspect of the story that I’ve held onto very closely, but I won’t give that away just yet.

All for the sake of the story being what it wants to be.

To break in even deeper, it felt apt to go on a run I was procrastinating on. I listened to an episode of The Morning Shakeout podcast about the evolving reasons we run, to better think about why my character might be drawn to running. What she might be looking for on the trail—and what she might find instead.

I also read the short story, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” by Allen Sillitoe, who was considered part of a group of writers called “the angry young men” writing in the ‘50s. None of them liked this title, but they all wrote about some aspect of disillusionment with society.

Am I telling you too much? Well. By the time it comes out, surely you will forget all this and the book will be wildly different. By then, this will be nice to look back on.

As for the writing itself…I think it’s going to be another sprint forward where I leap and grab things on the way down to cushion the fall.