My Novel-Length Work in Progress (WIP) Turned Five this Summer

Ember Everly was killed 5 years ago last month, August 16 in fact, which was a Friday that year and this. But she did not exist in this life; she is fictional. In the real world, 5 years ago August 14, then president Trump was quoted at one of his rallies as saying the solution to the gun problem was to lock up the mentally ill. If I was an American, this would terrify me, as a mentally ill, non-violent woman. I abhor violence yet myself and others like me, are constantly scapegoated for society’s violence. Rises in community violence have complex causation largely associated with resource allocation. As someone with lifelong mental illness, I have lived under stigma my whole life. In high school I wrote and directed a play exploring why a schizophrenic young person might become violent and what we as a society should do with such a person. I believe stigma perpetuates the suffering inherent in mental illness by preventing people from acknowledging their symptoms and seeking treatment. I myself likely would have sought treatments of varying kinds sooner, perhaps even finding one that brought me closer to remission, had it not been for the fear and shame of discrimination.

I had a few older ideas converge due to the inspiration to fight back against Trump’s sentiment. At the time, however, I was also writing a memoir-like project. Not long after the ideas for Hope is a Necessary Delusion came together, I applied to a local year-long writers program. In this program, a mentor chooses you to work with. I applied with writing samples of both my creative nonfiction and my speculative fiction. I was chosen by the speculative fiction mentor. My decision was made: I would focus on this novel, rather than the memoir, which has long been abandoned.

That year I wrote a complete draft of the novel, and outlined a sequel and a third book. I may have even started drafting the second book, I cannot recall. It was very heavily speculative and had bounty hunters and a king. Then the summer of 2020 hit and the protests for Black Lives Matter swept over our consciousness. I was already determined to make my book intersectional to reflect the world I live in and the world as it is. I chose to make my main character a mixed-race Black woman. There was a lot of pushback from the white people in my writing group, saying it’s not possible for me, a white writer to write a Black protagonist. All the BIPOC I consulted, however, had no problem with me attempting this. It was an odd place to be in, a hurtful place. I spent all that summer thinking it through and someone said I hadn’t thought it through enough, which touched a nerve in me for sure. It’s been a journey I continue on and will continue on for the rest of my writing life: how do we write in an intersectional way when we are limited by our own perspectives? It’s especially important to write an intersectional work that is focused on mental illness and stigma against mental illness because stigma affects BIPOC and LGBTQA+ people more than it does cis white people in a hetero relationship like myself. That’s a fact that cannot be ignored.

A second thing happened that year which fundamentally changed the novel: I realized I wasn’t writing the novel I wanted and set out to write. Ember Everly dies in an accidental shooting, not an intentional one. That is the inciting incident and thus dictates the tone and purpose of the novel. It had been suggested to me that I make her death deliberate. I was convinced by this person’s logic that it’s what a male writer would do so whey can’t I as a woman do it? I remember the word feminist coming up as well. But that’s not the novel I want to write, and I shouldn’t do things just because men do them (far from it in most cases…). So towards the end of that year-long writing program, I threw out the completed draft and started again.

Since then, the energy of this novel ebbed and flowed with intensity: it was powerful and all-consuming when it was present, leaving me determined to keep pressing on; when it left me, it might as well have been orbiting the furthest star. I’m not sure I ever declared it dead and buried, like I often have with the full draft of a different novel I completed in 2012. I know I’ll always come back to this one. I have had another baby, taken workshops on how to outline and finish a book-length work, and also took on a mentorship to guide me through writing it.

But despite re-starting it over and over, I was stuck. Stuck on what those white writing group peers had said about what I could not do. The truth is, I am disabled. There is only so much I can do. I realized my passion and determination do not match my capacity. The novel was, up until recently, to be told through eight different intersectional character perspectives. This would have me writing first person from a bisexual Black man’s perspective and a non-binary First Nations person’s perspective, for example. To do this well, I would need to do decades of research and community call-in work. I finally accepted: that’s beyond my ability as a disabled woman. I also think that 8 voices, coming from any character, are beyond my craft skill.

The very mental illness I have wanted to write about is what is holding me back from writing the novel I want to write. So I recently made my main character white again, after four years of trying to write her as Black. And I chose not to write first person from multiple points of view. I will retain the intersectional characters I planned to write but I’ve come up with a conceit that will allow me to be both deep in their heads, and also removed from them. There will be a meta element of me as a white woman learning about the inner lives of people different from me.

I am a privileged depressive, as I have written about before. Any book I am to write about mental illness must inherently acknowledge that privilege and include the perspectives of less privileged mentally ill people. That includes people who have even more severe mental illnesses than me. I never really understood how people argued I couldn’t write from a different racial perspective but not from, say, the perspective of a person with schizophrenia. A Black man’s inner world is just as foreign to me as that of a person with schizophrenia. Then again, stigma lumps us all in together, just as racism does. Every person is unique. There is no universal Black experience, there is no universal schizophrenic experience. We are all individuals. I hope that I will finish this novel one day and you will get to meet Ember and the people who are affected by her death. I hope you will get to learn from their fictional experiences. And see that violence happens in this world, tragically, but it is perpetrated by individuals, not by the mentally ill as a group.