Someday I'll Write That Novel

That's what we all say, right? Someday, we're all going to write a book. (I was going to say "novel," but then I remembered some people have the attention span to write an entire book of nonfiction.) I want to write a novel. I want to prove to myself I can do that, and I need the practice stretching my ideas over a longer word count. So far, I haven't figured out how to get there. I like to think I'm pretty good with beginnings and endings, but in the case of Vivian, I may have written the middle of an outline with no idea what comes before or after.

The main problem is that my ideas are so compact, they barely fill a thousand words on average. Something I love about Vocal+ challenges is that minimum word count sitting at 600 words. That's exactly the size my ideas come in. I guess I'm a microfiction kind of girl. When something I write passes the 1200 word mark, it feels like I've done a vigorous workout. There's one piece I did in recent memory that made it past 2000 words, and I could hardly believe it.

Early in my Vocal journey, I participated in a challenge called New Worlds in which the prompt was to write the first chapter of a sci-fi story. The story had to begin with the line: "Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say." For that challenge, I wrote Trans-Neptunian: Chapter One. This was the first time I felt truly capable of writing a long-form story. While the idea was incomplete, I was able to write a beginning with no end attached, or even planned. For a few days I thought that might be the story that becomes a novel, but most of the good ideas escaped before I could write them down. Maybe someday it'll come to me.

Back to Vivan. Ideas are hard for me, but I've found Vocal's challenges helpful as writing prompts. The Behind the Last Window challenge was to write a dystopian fiction story beginning with the line, "The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room." My brain churned out something reminiscent of the dystopian YA novels of the 2000s. A young woman under the control of a creepy, powerful man. A scrappy young man to fall in love with. At first I worried it would be too cliche, but I stuck with it.

Living in an impossibly tall, aging skyscraper, generations of people struggle in poverty, in a literally inescapable slum. They've been told the world outside is gone, or at least uninhabitable. They continue to build upward to create more room for a growing population in cramped quarters. The lower floors are for the upper class, and our heroes are among the staff keeping things comfortable for them. Vivian plays piano for guests under the watchful eye of The Architect. Hans works in the kitchen. The teens don't care for the rich weirdos they serve, but the proximity to wealth allows them to provide for their families.

One day they discover a piece of crumbling wall tucked in a forgotten alcove on a transitional floor between the "old" and "new" districts. A cool breath of air works its way through. Vivian and Hans work in secret to open up the wall, revealing a structure once known as a "fire escape." From here the idea gets a little fuzzy, but some kind of urgent development pushes them to make a run for it. The Vocal story ends with Vivian reaching the ground and looking up at countless identical skyscrapers, and not a whole lot else. The sky is brown, but she can see the real sun.

It feels like there's a whole book in there, right? It feels like the midpoint of a novel. I keep asking myself questions to tease out more information and I just get nowhere. There has to be a story behind my story, but I can't find it. Why is this population living indoors? Clearly something happened in the past, but I don't know what. Why do they need to escape? Curiosity doesn't seem like a strong enough reason. What does Vivian find in the outside world? Again, I have no clue. What are the villain's motivations, anyway? I don't know. The narrative structure feels like Vivian would need to return to the building for some kind of final confrontation, but what happens between the middle and the end?

I know all the questions to ask. If someone else were brainstorming their story with me, those are the kinds of questions I would ask to help them figure it out. But it's been a few years now and I just can't answer the questions. It's not even that the tentative answers seem wrong; I'm just drawing blanks. How do people think up enough world and enough story to fill an entire series? Everything I write feels like fading dreams.

Ideas are so hard for me. Every finished piece feels like a miracle. This year has been especially rough. The ideas are having a heck of a time finding their way through the fog and the constant pressure in my mind. When the answers finally come to me, it will be such a relief. Someday I'll complete an outline for Vivian, and it will make sense, and I won't hate it. I have to believe it. I need the closure as much as Vivian does.