Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Having reached a point that is in the neighborhood of halfway through my rough draft, I thought it might be interesting to record my thoughts about the progress of The Ghost of Canard University. Since few people as yet are closely following my progress, this is mostly an exercise for myself. However, should it be uncovered in future times, and should anybody be curious about my thoughts on the creative process, it may not be an uninteresting read!

To start at the beginning, the germ of this novel goes back to my own freshman year of college, which began in the far-off year of 2005. My friends and I, nerdy young men all, used to discuss comic books, animation, science fiction, and everything that goes with all that, and I had an idea for a story based around a super hero who could generate an impregnable energy field around his body, and his adventures on a college campus with a girl who could read minds. I would imagine various scenarios they could get into and what kinds of foes they would face, and think to myself “this would make a good novel.” And then I wouldn’t write the novel, because I was either genuinely too busy, or too scatterbrained to focus on anything of such a scale. I made a few experiments in shorter fiction on an ancient blog, and some of them might have been alright, but I burned myself out trying to hold myself to an artificially tight schedule, and I couldn’t envision myself doing the sheer quantity of work it would require to write something as long as a novel.

It should be noted that I didn’t always think very highly of myself in those years, and that by “those years” I sometimes mean to include “these years,” because I have what 19th century novelists might call a “melancholy disposition.” But that’s another essay.

I do recall, however, making at least three false starts on a story based on the initial premise. Two are probably lost to time, and I think the third is sitting on an old Google doc. I don’t actually use Google Docs very much, but I imagine it’s probably still there. That one was begun shortly before the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, and you would think that would mean I’d have had so much time to devote to a passion project, but

I began what almost became a fourth false start almost a year ago, writing some fragments of the first chapter in an OpenOffice document, and another fragment in an e-mail that I sent to myself. A few months later (I think around January), I wrote a draft of the first part of chapter 2 on a legal pad, an act which quite possibly saved this attempt from oblivion. At that stage, however, the story still did not have a title, or an ending, or much of a plot at all, beyond the initial scenario. I had no idea what motivated my antagonist to cause problems for my protagonist. The main characters didn’t even have surnames, and I was pretty sure they were going to need them sooner or later.

Around the beginning of this summer, I experienced a shift in my mindset, and realized that I had it in me to make something out of this concept that had bumped along in my head for nearly two decades. I also read a book, Novelist as a Vocation, by Haruki Murakami. This book gave me a clearer picture of what it would look like to make writing novels a part of my life, particularly as Murakami described his experience in writing his first books, before he achieved popularity and notoriety. With these insights in mind, I laid out a new routine for myself, and began the process by pulling up my fragments, and stitching them together.

I also upgraded from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, which I would have done a long time ago if I’d been writing seriously. It’s good stuff.

Having assembled my pieces, it was time to begin adding on. Since I still didn’t have a concrete plot, I decided it was best to make the premise concrete, and discover the story by elaborating on it, fleshing out my setting and my existing characters, and looking for opportunities to introduce new ones. It was then that it acquired a working title, Canard University, and I started to pick up steam.

One choice I feel very pleased about was to abandon a previous idea to tie the arc of the plot to the progress of an academic year, and condense the time frame to December of 2005. My reason for picking that year was to ground the story as close as I could to the world in which it originated, and come as close as possible to telling the story that I meant to tell back then. Although The Ghost of Canard University has science fiction elements and I did not feel bound to reconstruct that time with exactness, I did not want to wrestle with the technological and social changes that would complicate the story I was trying to tell. My characters have cell phones, and they mainly use them to call and text one another (the latter most sparingly, as it was expensive back then), while the internet largely lives on laptops and desktop computers (where it belongs).

I made other large-scale decisions, such as basing the setting around fictionalized versions of real places I knew well, so that I could imagine them quickly and change them as needed. I divided the narrative’s perspective between three characters: the two heroes who had been there from the very beginning, now called Sean and Sybil, and a non-powered friend named Eric. As I developed them, they gained not only surnames but histories, interests, anxieties, desires, and relations to a social world that started to seem so much firmer. At first they were like alternate versions of myself; in time, I learned all of the ways they could be different from me.

I pushed myself to include supplementary chapters that added perspectives from outside the central trio, and I used their experiences to explore themes (themes!) that arose as I put myself in their positions. I discovered ways to say things that I’d always wanted to say, and be things I’ve always wanted to be. I also learned how to quit worrying about whether anybody cared what I had to say, or whether anybody had ever said it before. They haven’t said it quite like this, and that “quite” is what’s mine in the end.

Most importantly, from a plotting perspective, I eventually figured out what the hell my antagonist wanted, which means that I more or less know how the story is going to end, and what sort of things they’re going to be up to in the meantime. When you’re trying to tell a story, that is very liberating.

The result thus far is that this story now has infinitely more substance to it than it has in all of its years of waiting to be told, and I am thrilled that I have been able to punch it up with flights of imagination, incorporate elements of various genres, and apply craft to inspiration without losing control of the project. Indeed, the more I write, the more happy I am with the decision to finally pursue this in earnest.

As of my latest count, I’ve laid down 37,605 words in the service of The Ghost of Canard University. I’m no longer sure how many words it will end up with, but that’s just a hair short of my initial target of 40,000, and I can easily see it getting up over 70,000. That I’ve done this all myself is incredible, and that it might actually be any good (and I’ve got to say, it feels like it might be) is all that I could have hoped for.