Writing has been coming faster lately. The ideas have been coming even faster than that. The curse is merely that it comes when my time available for writing is minimal—but it’s far better than the opposite. An idea I don’t have the time to work on is… uncomfortable, but having time to write and nothing meaningful to explore is like staring into an empty refrigerator, with your belly growling. I’ll take what I have, thanks.
I’ve always been an eclectic writer. Other than the broad umbrella of fantasy or the even broader speculative fiction, I barely have a favored genre. Some people have called that “range” and considered it a strength, but just as often, I’ve considered it a lack of focus. It doesn’t build confidence (for me, anyway) when someone asks what you write, and you have no answer but, “Oh, you know… stuff.”
But lately, it seems that I’ve been writing about something. Not a specific genre—that’s as varied as ever. But certain themes keep popping up.
The Woman of Bones, my much-delayed novel, is largely about a friendship forming against many odds and the lengths we will go to for one. It also explores cultural identity: what makes us who we are, and how we decide to approach what has come before us and sculpted us.
She Cuts Herself, one of my most recent works, is also an exploration of identity—though more personal and immediate (and literal). It’s about a woman who seldom wakes up as the same person, yet always somehow remains herself.
When I began writing Misnakes—published just last Sunday—I had no idea where it was going, until the fourth line: “You’re also my friend.” From there, it just… flowed, as much as anything I’ve ever written. It, too, became an exploration of friendship—what we will do for our friends, both new and old; what we do when we fail them; and what we do when we have to choose between one and the other. And who we are afterward.
When I started my current work-in-progress, Noplace Like, I had, again, no idea where it was going. It was my first time writing what I knew: a teacher at a public school that was a thinly veiled (heh) reflection of the one where I work now. I didn’t know much about the narrator, and I let him reveal himself to me as I wrote. And then he said to someone, “Thanks for answering, old friend.”
And the friend replied, “What is it like to have lived so short a time that our friendship seems old?”
What is it, indeed? And the adventure the two go through thereafter tests his very concept of self. (Also, time.)
Lie I said, the ideas come faster than the writing goes, and the night before I wrote these words, a question came to me—the most trivial of questions, it seemed. But it kept coming back, and this morning, it blossomed into a forest of story ideas. I don’t want to say too much about it—it’s too soon, and no work has been done on any of them—but they explore what it means to be you, or me, or… anyone at all.
So there we go. I seem to be all about the themes of who and what we are—with ourselves and with one another. And, as with the last two stories I began writing them, I do not know where any of this is going to go.
But I’m really, really excited to find out.
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