*Written on 10/2/21
I’m in a coffee shop a few blocks from my house in West Seattle, trying to get inspired to move my next novel forward. Only, there are so many ideas, so many connections, so many implausibilities, that it can often feel like a maze of dead ends.
When I was a kid, I would draw mazes to pass the time away, often during school or in the boredom of summer. It would start off simple—straight parallel lines forming simple paths, then splitting into more and more paths, forming rectangular vortexes. Once enough paths were open, about a dozen, sometimes more, I would intertwine one with another and ultimately lead them to a disappointing dead end, then do the same with the other paths. Eventually, I would seal off all paths until I got to “The One” which would lead my maze to the open freedom of the blank page.
One time, in fourth grade, I built a masterpiece of a maze, full of deception and the longest most convoluted solution I thought I could ever design. I gave it to my classmate—Morgan was his name—and challenged him to try and find a way to the end. He took my maze, and said, “Oh! This guy has rockets!” Then scraped his pencil lead from the start of my maze to the end, breaking through all the walls I had built with the unerasable bold line of his pencil pushed on the paper with all his might. I was livid in the moment. I spent a good fifteen minutes building that maze during class. Now, thirty years later, I recall this story and claim it an unforgettable moment in my history. Sometimes, we don’t realize when things don’t go smoothly, the best stories of our lives are being constructed, as are the lessons.
I wish that writing in this coffee shop was as easy as Morgan’s straight line, getting from start to finish, unabated by barriers and not confined to guesswork with inevitable dead ends. No, writing Reset—the tentative title of my next novel—is like the laborious design of a maze, one that I will spend years toiling to create so that my readers can pull a Morgan and zip through from start to finish, not recognizing the walls I ran into trying to find the resolute word. For them, the joy is in the convenience of the story being handed to them. For me—and sometimes I forget this—the joy is crafting this story, hitting a wall, then having to follow another path until I find the daylight of a blank page.