Introducing Community Day
A subscribers-only column about my novel and, more broadly, why fiction
I’m beginning a new weekly column that will be available to paid subscribers only. It will be dedicated to why I’ve spent thousands of hours over the last 4+ years writing a novel—and the process of trying to get it published.
To get access to this new column, please become a paid-subscriber now for as little as $5/month. (All you need to do is hit the “Upgrade to Paid” button.)
Early in the pandemic, I started writing Community Day. It’s 81,000 words of literary/upmarket fiction. It’s set in a rural county during the pandemic. It’s about truth, isolation, geography, and our duty to our neighbors. It begins as an earnest comedy about contemporary small-town America. It ends as a tragedy about the costs—mistrust, conspiracies, selfishness, loneliness, and violence—when community disappears.
The novel’s gone through 59 significant drafts and had 37 different readers. I’ve thought about every single sentence, added and subtracted sections, rewritten characters, re-conceived relationships, grappled continuously with the ending, and much more. I finally feel like it’s ready to share with the world…but now I have to convince agents and publishers of that.
So this column will be about the process of writing fiction (e.g., idea generation, drafting, editing) and its substance (e.g., characters, plot, subplots, themes). It will also be about the arduous, uncertain task of getting it published.
Everyone will still be able to get, free-of-charge, my Governing Right columns on public service. But each week, only paid-subscribers will receive this new product. I’ll discuss:
Why, after years of focusing on non-fiction, I felt the need to write fiction
How my fiction and non-fiction are related—and how they differ in key ways
How to get readers to understand and care about a story’s quest or question
Why I use an unreliable narrator—and how that makes storytelling more challenging but more compelling
How I think about literary allusions, symbolism, callbacks, and other devices
How I think about creating characters—everything from shaping their appearances and voices to ensuring they have their own agency to making sure they are consistent but evolve
How to build suspense and sustain readers’ interest and, hopefully, make them refuse to put the book down in the last 50 pages
How to convince the people in charge of publishing that this thing you’ve worked on for so long deserves a shot (I don’t have answers to this one yet…)
For millennia, it has been common for those interested in public life (including philosophers, public servants, and journalists) to write non-fiction and fiction. Beginning in 2014, I started to understand why. It’s been a pleasure to write this novel, and I have learned a great deal.
This column will be a way to share all of that with you.