The world split in two: a different reality for Wavy and Kellen

As I’ve confessed before, I’m a very chaotic writer. I start in the middle and write my way out in the most spectacularly messy and unorganized way. The thing that guides me–since I never know what the plot will be–is character development and motivations. As I write scenes, I’m always asking, “What decision will this character make and why?” Sometimes I come up with different answers for the same character and the same scene. As a writer, I have the power to let a character investigate different choices, even if it splits the story in two.

While writing All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, the world split in two fairly early on. In Part 2, Chapter 5, Kellen is presented with a decision that strikes at the heart of his uncertainty about his place in the world. A one night stand with a woman he barely knows, or an evening spent with someone he truly cares about.

On its surface, it looks like such a minor choice. One night out of so many. An act of self-indulgence that nobody could blame him for. Well, almost nobody. But when I wrote that other choice, it changed the angle of so many things in Kellen’s life. It changed so many things in Wavy’s life. It changed the whole book.

 

That’s what’s going out in my newsletter this week: the first part of that alternate version. The one in which Kellen makes a different decision and the planets change their alignment. If you’re curious about how such a minor choice can change Wavy and Kellen, or if you’re curious about how I investigate my characters during the writing process, you can read this months newsletter here, or you can sign up for the newsletter here.

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Leading a double, triple, quadruple life

When I was six years old, my mother sold me to a witch who lived in a tiny cottage out on the open prairie. I had to live in a lean-to next to the chicken coop, where I could hear the birds fussing and roosting at night. During the day, I tended her garden and worked over the open fire of her hearth, helping her prepare potions. Many of the spells she made were to help people, but a few were to curse people, like the old wizard who snored away the days in her front room. She kept him sleeping so that she could drain his powers for her own purposes.

I dreamed of running away, and eventually I did, fleeing across wheat fields on a stormy August night with a one-armed man who claimed to be a prince but was really just a common thief. Later, I had to run away from him and his life of crime. For several years, I passed myself off as a maid to a duchess, but I would never get free of the witchcraft I had been taught as a child.

Also, it turns out that what I considered a totally normal childhood activity–fully immersive daydreaming that spanned years and took up hours of each day–isn’t completely normal. According to this article in The Atlantic, it may be maladaptive daydreaming. Its author describes something similar to my life, including the pressing need for alone time, so that I could  live in my alternate reality. Or in my case, alternate realities. For her it caused excessive disruption to her daily life and she sought medication to alleviate it.

My initial solution as a child was to use it to fuel the tedious parts of my life. I did spend a lot of hours in my grandmother’s kitchen, helping her cook and can. My grandfather spent a lot of time sleeping and grouching. Drudgery was more bearable if I was shucking corn to make “potions,” or planning my escape from the witch while I pulled weeds. At school, where I was always the first one done with an assignment, my daydreaming kept me from getting bored, because I had somewhere to go for the half hour it took the other students to finish their work.

As a teenager and then an adult, I incorporated my daydreaming into my daily life by writing. Perhaps if I’d been trying to become a lawyer or a doctor, it would have been unbearable, but because I was content to be a secretary and eager to be a writer, it never struck me as a condition for which I needed treatment.

The article suggests that it’s related to obsessive-compulsive disorder or stereotypic movement disorder, which I can easily believe, and it makes me feel a bit conflicted of the role my obsessive and ongoing daydreaming plays in my life. I was relieved in my teens to shed many of the symptoms of my OCD. I don’t miss washing my hands a hundred times a day or engaging in the sort of repetitive behaviors that used to rule my life. (If I didn’t read the entire cereal box three times before I finished eating my breakfast, the witch would kill someone I loved.)

Now that I’ve found a role for my incessant daydreaming, however, I would not want it to end. It would leave a hole in my life. In my lives. Especially now that I’ve run away from my husband and come back to live in the cottage on the prairie. The witch is long dead, but the wizard is still sleeping in the front room. I keep him drugged so that I can use his power as I plan my revenge against the dance hall girl who cursed me.

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