Every year I participate in NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. Every year I attempt to complete a novel, defined for NaNoWriMo as some work totalling at least fifty thousand words. I’ve completed one once, and that was not this year.
It’s a considerable commitment, to be sure. The one year I completed NaNoWriMo was the one year I was between jobs. There was very little else going on in my life at the time, so given the circumstances it would have been more surprising if I hadn’t completed a novel that one particular November.
This year was a story titled The Stars Between. It tells three separate stories set in the same setting, and while the stories themselves never intersect many of the same themes are repeated between them and dealt with differently. It was a story about different people in different places struggling with similar situations. The Stars Between also has some baggage.
A long, long time ago I had a story called The Merchant. Its very earliest iterations dealt with an interstellar merchant and his anxiety at returning home. This evolved over time, time dilation was added as an important plot element, and The Merchant was never completed. At some point it evolved into other things.
Sirius and Thalassa was The Merchant‘s spiritual successor. It dealt with time dilation and the relationship between two people, one of which was an interstellar merchant. This story was completed, and while it was never published in any form it remains in some finished state. It was a very, very short story. At the time the brevity was a necessity. I wasn’t that confident in writing characters, the story itself had no dialog, and the less said about the setting the better. It was a vignette through and through.
Sirius and Thalassa continued to develop, which led in a very roundabout way to Superluminal, the story that was completed for NaNoWriMo in 2015. While Superluminal didn’t share any of the same beats as Sirius and Thalassa, it started out as a retelling of that story in novel form. It’s pretty telling in how much time I had that I was able to switch plots completely during the first half of the month. Superluminal is a very different story from Sirius and Thalassa, but was set in the same universe that I had been building out in the back of my mind for the prior several years. Most relavant to Sirius and Thalassa is that Sirius was a character in Superluminal, and that novel covered the end of his particular story.
A few years later, with no published stories with my name on them, I wanted to get back to writing. I returned to Sirius and Thalassa, and as an experiment retold The Merchant in the same setting as Sirius and Thalassa and Superluminal. My greatest regret about Superluminal was that it didn’t cover the other character who had persisted through all of these stories: Thalassa. If Superluminal was the end of Sirius’ story, a retelling of The Merchant was her’s. There is a draft somewhere with several thousand words in it.
At some point I was caught up in the world building. This is something I indulge in, to the detriment of actually getting anything done. The universe of this version of The Merchant, and by extension Superluminal, was already reasonably well established. It leaned more into “hard” science fiction than fantasy. It had reasons for its characters and cultures being the way they were. The worst part was keeping track of it all.
I still hadn’t finished anything, but I wanted to use the original Merchant as a template for a story. It’s a very simple template:
- A merchant is returning home.
- The merchant is anxious about what will have changed, and what will have remained the same, by the time they return.
- The merchant is anxious about making up for all the lost time with their family.
- The merchant heads home.
I wanted to return to this template as an exercise, but the universe of Superluminal already had a lot of baggage. So I made a new one. The Stars Between distinguishes itself from Superluminal by being science fantasy instead of fiction. But it certainly draws a lot from Superluminal‘s setting. And I do like to reuse place and character names.
Once again I was lost in world building. There were elements to rein in, as one of my greatest gripes about fiction is reserved for those works that lack internal consistency. I wanted this setting to be as consistent as possible, so that meant deciding on backgrounds for every element.
I’ve yet to find a happy medium for this, where elements can be defined just enough for a story to be relevant, but also have enough information and rationale behind them to make sense from an in-universe perspective.
Characters were shifted around. Instead of the nameless merchant or his successor Thalassa, The Stars Between followed a man learning that his mother was ill and making the excruciatingly long journey to his star of origin.
I had a goal of completing The Stars Between as a short story in a month. I never really gave it the time. When NaNoWriMo came around that short story remained incomplete, and I wondered how it would work as a novel. While that never actually happened, there were certainly some things I took out of the entire endeavor during NaNoWriMo this year.
I enjoy writing short stories. Novels are too long, and it will be some time before I’m confident in my ability to write something so considerable. It’s not so much the writing that I struggle with as it is creating the characters and plots interesting enough to carry a narrative of that length.
Telling separate journeys in the same universe is a monumental task. I was already familiar with the characters in the early short story-length version of The Stars Between. By separating the characters and sending them on their own journeys, I thought I could both develop them in greater detail and do something interesting with the similarities and differences between their individual journeys. What this ended up causing was a need to build out the settings for each character’s story. In this case I had to triple the amount of world building for the novel, since each character’s story took them around our little slice of the galaxy. This may not seem bad, but I abhor a lack of consistency, and there’s nothing quite like getting hung up on deciding on a culturally and historically appropriate place name for some frontier world that only appears twice in a single character’s plotline.
I can write characters and groups of characters. The latter was missing in Superluminal. I was comfortable with writing pairs of characters, but there are groups of four and five interacting within and outside their circles in The Stars Between. It’s comforting to know that I’ve come that far since Superluminal in being able to both write characters and give them distinct voices.
Jumping between multiple characters is a great way to remove filler. The important prerequisite here is being able to present them in a way that makes sense for pacing. All of the characters in The Stars Between are on journeys of their own. Instead of getting bogged down in specifics, it’s very easy to simply jump to the next character in line to keep the flow of the exposition going without sacrificing narrative.
For now The Stars Between will return to a short story format. I’ll forever be curious if it could have worked as a novel, but the individual journeys of Julian, Irem, and Quinton are now very distinct and character-focused plots of their own. And I would still like to finish something. The Stars Between remains a solid candidate for that proper return to writing.