Living the Sci-Fi Life

Well, not quite, though it kind of felt that way for the past three and a half years as I sat down at my laptop most mornings to write Beneath An Alien Sun.

What takes the reader days to complete often takes the writer years to develop. The stakes are high. Every writer’s effort invariably leads to the Page One door. Will the curious reader be interested enough after Page One to open the door, or will the reader keep the door closed, and toss the book aside?

My brother-in-law once told me writing a novel is an act of bravery. I don’t see it that way, I guess because I fall into that group of humans that can honestly say, “I can’t not write,” in the same way I might say, “I can’t not eat.”

Bravery has nothing to do with it. It’s about need. I need to eat to keep my body and brain alive. I need to write to maintain my sanity. And writing a novel isn’t accomplished over the course of days. It’s a marathon, and it’s for the most part a lonely, and not always pleasant, race.

But I do understand what my brother-in-law was getting at.

Writing a novel involves risk. Hours, days, years of sitting and writing. Why am I doing this? I complained to my wife that in the time it took me to write this book, I could have been relaxing on my recliner, reading a hundred books. Or, I could have been running around indulging in various pleasures. I could have been exercising more…

Not that I don’t like writing. I do, especially when it’s effortless. When that happens, I feel like I’m floating. But if writing was always effortless, I might begin to wonder if I’d been manufactured in a Robotics lab.

And then there’s the risk of rejection, being judged, rubbing people the wrong way, etcetera. No doubt about it, writing is a risky business. And maybe I’m not so brave as I am indiscrete. Because how do you write fiction without baring your soul?

You learn a lot about people by what they write and how they write what they’re writing about: the choices they make along the way, the what-ifs they address, the characters and situations they choose to create and reveal to the world of readers.

Sure, it’s a risky business. Some people aren’t going to like your story for any number of reasons. That may include not liking you because of the choices you’ve made in the story. But as a writer, those things don’t factor into your decision to do what you do. A true writer can’t not write, and certainly can’t be a phony.

When I say, “Living the Sci-Fi Life,” I’m not suggesting I was whisked off to some alternate universe for the past three and a half years, though at times it did feel that way. Writing a novel that you want people to find both entertaining and thought-provoking requires full immersion. It’s a mental, emotional, and physical grind.

Numerous characters emerge from the gray folds of the writer’s brain and take up residence there forever. They get themselves into trouble, fall in love, face unexpected challenges, undergo periods of despair and hope. And it all happens in the writer’s head, all day long, into the writer’s nighttime dreams, for years.

How often have I said to my wife, “I woke up this morning with a new idea for Chapter X,” or, “I woke up with the answer on how to resolve that issue I was having in Chapter Y?” It’s like having a developmental editor in my head who assumes the burden of writing the novel while the rest of me lies in bed asleep, recuperating.

So, in some ways, I have been living a Sci-Fi life these past few years, immersing myself in the highly commercialized techy world of 2100-2104 AD, surviving an apocalypse, and time traveling back to 2104 from alien-controlled planet earth, circa 4104 AD.

Writing a Sci-Fi novel was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. My first novel, Mr. Galaxy’s Unfinished Dream (literary fiction), took me eighteen months to write. I completed the first draft in three months.

As I said, Beneath An Alien Sun took me over three and a half years. What I thought was the first draft took me a year. It was a mess. I decided to scrap the whole story, reassess what I was thinking and doing, and start all over again.

I’ll talk about why I decided to write a Sci-Fi novel—and discuss in a little more detail why I write at all—in the next post. I’ll address the challenges I experienced taking on what would become an exhausting, often frustrating, but ultimately satisfying experience writing Beneath An Alien Sun.

Be well, all,
Ramon