Writing My Novel - Part I

An introduction to the protagonist

A while back, I wrote about how I wanted to make my creative writing a more consistent part of this newsletter. Since then, you have received a post in which I thought about the costs of the pursuit of knowledge as well as a poem about what fences say about our society. These posts form an addition to what you could consider as the ‘main’ content of this newsletter, which is a monthly longer post with well-researched reporting. You have also received two posts that are kind of in between these two categories of posts, namely a letter writing exchange about artificial intelligence (so far one letter and my response letter) that I am having with

Joe Mayall

. If you are only interested in my reporting, and less in the creative writing that everything I learn, read, research, and think about inspires, know that you can unsubscribe from the ‘Creative Writing’ section of this newsletter through your profile settings, so you will only receive my reporting (interviews, collaborations, the AI letter exchange, etc.).

In this post, I will be sharing a shortened excerpt from my novel, which can hopefully provide the basis for further posts and discussions around what I’m writing about. I am still in the process of figuring out how I feel about sharing parts of an unpublished story. There are several reasons for this. For one, these passages will lack context and could therefore have a different impact compared to when you’re reading it as part of the larger story. There is also the potential for spoilers, although I think that risks is quite manageable by removing certain passages. Perhaps what worries me most is putting out something into the world before it is fully ready and thereby ultimately weakening the impact of the novel as a whole. On the plus side, sharing passages allows me to get you interested in the story so that once I finish it, more people will read it. Furthermore, there is an opportunity for a form of instant feedback that would not have been possible otherwise.

For now, taking all of the above into account, I have decided to share edited excerpts from my latest draft with you and all other subscribers, but to not make the post accessible on the web and in the Substack app except for paid subscribers. Since the goal is to facilitate discussion and to hopefully get you interested and invested in the story, perhaps enough to go out and buy it once it’s finished, I will be using the Substack Chat as the medium through which we can exchange thoughts and ideas. The chat is only accessible to subscribers to this newsletter, which makes it different from and more intimate than a comment section, where everyone can comment.

Throughout these posts, I’ll be providing some commentary here and there to contextualise the passages, and to introduce several writing styles that I’m using throughout the story. The following passage is from the first chapter. I have combined multiple separate passages for this post, as I feel like it gives you a solid introduction to Stuart, the protagonist of the story, and establishes his main struggles. What these passages also do is subtlely introduce several topics that are part of the novel’s themes. Many of these themes are also what I write about in this newsletter, and I would say they showcase what I want to achieve with this novel, which is to write a fictional story with a solid basis in reality (although not enough to take itself too seriously all the time) through which the characters can philosophise and speculate on where we are going as a society. Enjoy!