Timelines and Brain Lanes

I’ve started writing a new novel, which creatively is great and strategically is ill-advised. Despite having a brain that loves being in many places at once, when it comes to writing the last six or seven years seem to suggest that I can only handle one mode. The years I spent working on my first novel, I wrote almost no poems. Last year I finally put that book aside, and wrote two poetry collections in under six months1. One of those books went out into the world, but I’ve still been working on/with the other—first in revising it, then in submitting it to contests.2 And so the plan had been to keeping shopping around that manuscript and submit some poems to journals and do some work to set myself up for future performance opportunities and events to sell Recurring Characters. Building the poet brand, you could say.

And now… well, now I don’t know. Does fiction brain just impact poetry writing, or does it change my enthusiasm and energetic direction entirely? I don’t know; I guess we’ll find out.

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The funny thing about the new novel is that it is made up of ideas that are very not new. The most basic germ of the premise has been kicking around in my brain since at least 2020—I had no characters, but I had a clear sense of the world (unusual for me). I tried at various points to match the world to different characters I had ideas about, but nothing clicked.

Then, in 2023, suddenly I had two characters who lived in the world with personalities and families and lives. Luci and Mads. I have many voice memos from the time of me trying to capture ideas and work through the plot. I knew the kind of story I wanted to tell, but I kept getting carried toward what I can only describe as someone else’s version of the story. When I couldn’t crack the plot, I tried making a home for Luci and Mads in other ideas but nothing stuck.

And then last fall, I encountered something random while walking the dog one morning and after thought, “oh this is the beginning of the book.”3 But I was in poetry brain, and then depression brain, and so it just brewed in my mind for awhile.

At the end of May, as I started to feel like a functioning human again, I create a document in the Notes app titled “THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN” and I wrote the first scene of the book. And afterwards I just keep tinkering with it—writing a little more, filling the gaps. I didn’t feel like I was working on it in June, and yet I ended the month with more words than I started with.

And when July started, something in my brain switched. The book went from something I was sort-of-but-not-really working on, to something I was very absolutely doing. I made a scrivener file, and I started to write “for real.” I sent the first chapter off to my writing group, and on Friday they’ll tell me what they think of this weird little story that’s been five years in the making.4