Where do you want to go today?

An idea came to me yesterday morning, in the form of a dream, for a new project. It would probably be novel-length, and would most probably be a straight murder mystery, with no speculative element currently in sight.

I had feelings of great anxiety about the project all day, which made me rethink my position on why I write about people and places much different from me.

I lack objectivity.

The protagonist of the proposed novel would essentially be the Me that was seven or eight years ago. She would live in a small town similar to the one I lived in then, she would have the same profession I did then, she would have the same trauma that I did then (or shortly thereafter).

Just the thought of writing such a character, and about her at such length, put my stomach in knots. I finally thought, 'I can't do it.'

Well, maybe I can, but that's a topic for another day.

What I want to talk about today is the importance of objective distance from one's protagonist. My stories always come back to me in the end. Even if I think I'm writing about someone else, usually it's my neuroses and issues that end up there on the page. But I have to start off in Antarctica or New Guinea or Portugal, and work my way back there. I have to start off with a balding, overweight guy, or a ten-year-old black girl, or a group of T'ang Chinese. Because if I start out with the intention of writing about me, about the stuff I know, the people I know, I bog down in too much reality.

I've been discussing the issues of depth and distance with wonderful, underappreciated writers like Miquela Faure and P.J. Thompson, and I realize that I've been dancing around my own problems with the page like Muhammad Ali in the ring. I cannot start at zero and work my way to one hundred. I have to start at two million, and hope I find my way back to zero. As a writer, I have to write from the outside in, rather from the inside out.

And I realize now that writers who do it just the opposite way are doing it the right way for them. It's just not the right way for me.

Moreover, while I'm up on the soapbox, let me take this opportunity to pimp an excellent essay by J. Steven York on the "rules" of writing, link helpfully provided by Jay Lake.