about a shift

a diary entry of sorts, about writing the new book, and fiction in general

Sketches of Alice appeared as a flash while i was trying very hard to focus on the complete opposite. it would be a biblical epic with very high and cosmic stakes. but the little slice of life took over me, and a frenetic month later, the book was finished. completion blues followed, of the most intense kind to date. in retrospect, i don’t think it was only about the tragic aspects of the book i’d just written. it was also about the problem of where to go from there.

Alice destroyed any interest i had in writing grandiose, speculative works of fiction. or rather, it revealed that my scope should be more limited, that my eye is better focused on small things, since even in the two speculative novels i’ve written, the focus is on human relations rather than the spectacular stuff. as this reviewer candidly (and accurately) puts it: ‘Laeth seems most interested in writing about romance’. (maybe this is why mormon theology appealed so deeply to me; it’s the most romantic view of eternity). the reviewer said this about my first novel, where there are gods and demons and things like that. it is, admittedly, a little pathetic. but i am who i am. pathos and all. better not fight it and instead try to better it.

that seemed fine, and abstract. the problem of what to write next was still there. i just knew i was done with fantasy and that i was still obsessed with the Alice book. luckily, at this point, i know more or less how to interpret these things, and had a faint vision that the next one, whatever it ended up being, should be set in the same quote unquote universe. i kept searching for it, but it was not forthcoming. two months after finishing Alice i had crippling writer’s block, but decided to fight it. i forced myself to write something, anything, and my mind settled on a candid description of how i spent april 28 2025.

on this date the power went out for the entire iberian peninsula for ten hours. it seemed interesting enough. but it wasn’t. my day was fine, not really all that exciting (that seemed to be the case for most people, it turned out). my wife came in, i told her what i’d been writing, and we started talking about the outage. soon we were thinking of people in dire straits. like my brother in law, whose plane landed just as the power went out, and then he ended up having to walk all the way home, because every other option was worse, or unavailable. or people stuck on the subway. or in elevators. that one sparked an idea right away. those things actually happened and they seemed like more fertile ground for fiction. not too long after that i had the elevator chapter done. and also the idea for the whole book.

the events of Powerless happen between the fourth and the fifth chapters of Sketches of Alice. as i said i was still obsessed and thought that making the connection more explicit would help me get over it without getting over it. it started with minor characters and soon Alice was mentioned. and then again. and then it was clear there had to be a chapter with her as a major character. i think readers of Sketches of Alice will find her appearances amusing, and in character. and those who encounter Alice for the first time will be enticed to read a whole book focusing on her.

but there is more to the book than Alice. and there is more to the book than romance. it seemed appropriate that the external, physical, literal powerlessness as setting, should be used to tell stories about human powerlessness against the randomness of life, both in its tragedies as well as in its blessings. and it couldn’t all be romance. there’s plenty of that too, but not alone, and in fact mostly as background. there is one and only one where it is truly the focus, and the true problem to be solved.

instead the general focus, between people, whatever their sex, is on a failure to communicate. i didn’t register this until i was writing the epilogue, but it seems obvious in retrospect that, in a hyper connected world like ours, the failure of the power grid would be felt more pressingly in one aspect above all others. if the power stayed down through the night, or for days, then it would be a different matter. but seeing as it came back before anyone could really worry, the most obvious difference was an inability to communicate. cellphones and internet were down. we suddenly felt alone in a way that was no longer usual.

thus the parallels between the physical, external failure of communications systems and the spiritual, internal one came to the fore without me really noticing. people can’t use their phones to call, but also can’t talk properly to the people next to them. seemed real enough. but how to make it magical. i don’t know, exactly, but i think i’ve succeeded. if there is one thing i attribute it to, is that i actually write characters that i like, and that i wouldn’t mind having a conversation with. i think that helps. love always helps.

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there were already a few metafictional aspects in Alice, but the structure of this book really allowed that to become central. first of all, creativity is a theme that interests me, and so it interests my characters too. and it fits the book as well. stories are essentially about connecting dots, hopefully making a full coherent picture, if the dots are linked properly (and amusingly). so it made sense to reflect on story structure within stories which are about failures to connect. i say it made sense, but precisely because actual story structures exist, there is a right way to tell a story and a wrong way. and for this one, the metafictional aspects appeared unprompted, like everything else, and only much later did i start to think about them analytically (as usual, and more on that at the end).

because of this, and also the mosaic aspects of the book, i think it will be most rewarding when reread, and i think it has potential for a couple rereads. (incidentally, as Sean pointed out to me, the word mosaic comes from muse; i didn’t know or had forgotten, but that too is a theme in the book). while the stories can be read as separate entities, each satisfying on their own, they are definitely better and more full in context. the whole is more than the sum of its parts. this is of course my opinion, but also that of my wife, and of Susana. they know what works and what doesn’t work and were not afraid to tell me when it didn’t.

the constraints of a mosaic also made it necessary to find not only specific tones for the stories, and voices for the characters, but even more importantly, the right structure. they couldn’t be all the same as that would make it tedious. and i am proud to say that, whether more or less conventional, each story has a different structure. some of them are quite strange, and i liked writing them. they were a fun challenge. i don’t know how readers will feel about some. there is a chapter that is foldable, like an origami. that was fun and difficult to write. as was the one that is only dialogue.

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Alice was already much heavier in dialogue than the previous two, and this one is just as heavy in most places. now, extended dialogues wouldn’t be such a big deal if i wrote dialogue like normal people, with tags and paragraph spacing. but i started out imitating José Saramago. i like how it immerses you in words, with nothing else to distract you, and you’re either in it or out of it. but i quickly found that i needed one more type of pause, of rest, one appropriate for the extended dialogue i wanted to write, and within the constraints i had already mastered. and so the ellipsis appeared. it might not seem important, but to me it was. i could write an essay on why i don’t use colons or semi colons in my fiction (i won’t, i promise). but something so simple as using an ellipsis was for me a significant departure and evolution. and in the new book is where i really became eloquent with it.

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Powerless turned out to be much lighter in tone, and much more comedic in nature. it would be appropriate to quote the lyrics of Que Sera Sera to capture the mood of this book. but it wouldn’t be economical, in both senses of the word. there are dramatic and even tragic elements, but overall the book is hopeful. this came somewhat as a surprise to me. as did a bunch of other things that in the end fit together so well that i couldn’t possibly have come up with them if i tried. the cynic would say that we see what we want to see. but if you have even the faintest sense for the poetic, you tell the cynic to have a drink, and relax. and after a couple even he agrees that there is at least some meaning to the universe. whether this one of ours, or the one in a fictional book. of course, i didn’t think about any of it as i was writing. i was just trying to grasp it.

and this is still the most amazing thing to me. that writing fiction continues to feel more like finding than inventing. when i’m writing, i know immediately whether it’s right or wrong. whether i’m telling the true story or a false version of it.

imagination as searchlight. an appropriate image. the metafiction stalks me.

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coming soon to your nearness