Hello, dreamers. This is it: my last week working on The Ursa Frontier. As I write this, I’m working on what will become the final chapters of this first installment of the Pioneers series.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve said it over the past few months, but I’m reminded again that writing is not an exact science. At present, I’m realizing that the penultimate chapter I’d planned will likely grow into two. I have a few unresolved storylines to tie up on my way to the big finish. But once I’ve finished the current chapter, I should be able to split the current final chapter in two, splicing in the necessary passages to wrap it all up.

I’m almost there.

But the work has been slow, and it’s taken me a while to fully understand why. So this week on “The Pioneer Sessions”, I wanted to talk a little more about the new writing style I’ve developed over the past year.

Digging In

From 2019 to last year, I did very little writing. A big part of that, to be fair, was due to first the pandemic and then the sudden, extreme, wonderful changes to my life that followed. But part of it, I’ve come to realize, was also due to stagnation.

After completing the first draft of The Ursa Frontier (titled Pioneers at the time), I plateaued as a writer. Perhaps part of it was due to what I call the “novel hangover”: the mental and emotional exhaustion following the completion of a novel, coupled with the unshakable feeling that you will never write anything better than what you just wrote. I poured a lot into that first draft, and I dare say it showed. It was great…at the time. But from there, I languished.

That continued for years. I just couldn’t find a way to recapture the magic of Pioneers, much less surpass it. And I think, honestly, I began to lose interest. I fell into the “Perfection Trap”, constantly making very minor tweaks to Pioneers while leaving the bulk of the story fully intact.

Then, late last year, I wrote Prishelets. And everything changed.

With that story, which began with an objectively hokey premise of Soviet nuclear scientists making contact with aliens in the 1940s, my writing style leapt forward. Prishelets was unlike anything I’d ever written before. There was deep interiority, suspense and intrigue, all playing into fears that alien beings might recognize the worst aspects of humanity and exploit them.

Prishelets became the kind of thing Pioneers had been: something so fresh and profound that it created a “before” and “after” in my writing. And after rattling off a string of additional short stories with this new writing style, suddenly I looked at Pioneers and no longer saw something fresh and profound. It didn’t look good enough. It didn’t look like me. Not anymore.

I wasn’t about to let the novel go out on query knowing it didn’t represent my best work. This story is far too important to me. So I set myself to the task of bringing Pioneers up to spec, as it were. And that process has occupied the bulk of my writing efforts for the better part of the past three months.

The culmination of this process came only in the past few weeks, when I wrote the first new chapters of The Ursa Frontier since the first draft. And just over the past few days, I realized that represented a milestone: my first time working on a novel project with my new writing style.

At first, I worried I’d lost my edge. While working on Pioneers, I averaged roughly 4,000-6,000 words a night. Over the past few weeks with the new chapters, I’ve barely managed around 1,200. But it slowly dawned on me that this wasn’t a sign that I was terribly out of shape, writing-wise. Rather, it was a consequence of the new style.

Since Prishelets, I’ve allowed myself to write as me. Pushing past years of bad writing advice posted online by people who have never published a book and likely never will, I let myself dig into the characters’ minds. I immersed myself in the scene, describing it through their eyes. I sat back and let the characters tell the story.

This new style is deep and immersive. It takes a lot out of me, and as a result I find myself writing more slowly, fully considering not just the scene, action, and dialogue, but what’s going on in the current POV character’s head. I transitioned from describing things to the reader to allowing them to experience the story. The result is slower-paced, but far deeper and more interior. And I dare say it’s vastly better than what I’d written before.

I have found, through experimentation over the past two days, that I can boost my daily word output by dividing my writing into “sessions” set throughout the day. With my new style, I can only write for so long at a time before I’m exhausted. By setting aside an hour or so here and there through the day, I’m able to recharge. And I spend time between sessions working out what comes next.

Obviously I’m eager to get this done. I’m on the clock, with summer fast approaching. And if I’m being honest, I find myself itching to move on to something new. But one of the things I’ve learned over the past year is that good writing cannot be rushed.

And, for the first time in years, I do believe what I’m doing is good writing. – MK