The Inchoate, Fragile, and Strange

Starting a new book is an exciting time of discovery, but also a solitary one, at least for me.  I’ve had several kind friends ask me lately what I’m working on.  It feels impolite to say I can’t really talk about it, like I’m holding out or I don’t trust them, but distrust is not why I don’t talk about my ideas.

The problem is that the ideas themselves are so fragile and shifting that by trying to summarize them into something coherent, I’m changing what they are.  Whether I talk about a new favorite character, focus on the conflict, or describe the world, I’m picking out some ideas or threads over others, and it feels like I’m making a promise I can’t keep, either to my friend or to my story.

It’s like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, where you can’t know the momentum and position of a particle at the same time, but this principle is for ideas.  The measuring itself, or the talking, changes the outcome.

The few times I’ve tried to talk about early ideas, it has made the writing harder or slower.  If I know a friend smiled or nodded at an idea, or seemed interested in another, or asked a question about another, then in the back of my mind, I’m already responding to that feedback, even if it wasn’t intended.  It makes me doubt my ideas in reflection of another’s response, instead of purely on my own.  I try to please them going forward, and that is limiting when I need to cast my net as wide as possible for all sorts of ideas.

I should add that my ideas are not merely bouncing around in my head, completely unformed.  They’re on paper, pages and pages of them by now, simmering and percolating with wrong directions and half-starts.  They’re taking on a shape I can’t yet see fully, and the process is an intriguing mix of “Aha!” and “What next?”

So, in case you ask me, that’s why I’m evasive.  I don’t mean to be impolite.  I’m just playing in the twilight alone.