Over the past 4 weeks, I’ve been working on a novella, airgap.txt. I produced 20,000 words of text and I’ve decided to stop. There’s nothing wrong with putting aside a project, as long as there is some reflection.
I’ve been thinking recently about writing longer, deeper work. airgap.txt was a first-person story about a woman running a blog about internet ghosts who investigates an incursion of fairyland into the real world. It was inspired by Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, egregores and NPC theory.
What I learned from this:
- The narrative was too linear to maintain my interest. I like reading both conventional and ergodic novels, but writing a linear narrative doesn’t excite me. I’ve used linear forms in a few novels, and the interesting bits were where I pushed and broke the format.
- One particular problem of writing a linear narrative was that there were no vignettes or sections that stood independently. Chuck Palahniuk has spoken about the fun of breaking off sections to try out, and I didn’t have the opportunity for that. I’m someone who loves the fragment, and anything I do should support that.
- I intentionally set out to write about an isolated character. This is incredibly difficult to get right, and I had a good try. The text was discursive, bringing in other perspectives; but it’s hard to write about an alienated character without alienating the reader. Some level of character conflict is more engaging to write.
- I started writing airgap.txt playfully, and built a good structure. But it would have been better to start with a clearer idea of where I might go.
- It’s easy for a discipline around writing to eradicate the playfulness, which is something that happened here.
What I enjoyed:
- Most of my writing has been for the weekly substack and the Wednesday Writers group, and I enjoyed trying to work on a larger scale.
- It was fun to explore the character, even if I’d not given her much space to express herself. I should have allowed more space for play – when I did, I loved it.