Q&A July 2021 - Why & How I Write

Hello everyone. One of the Patreons finally asked a question that I can write about. So here's a post for the end of July.

First of all, apologies for yet another delay in chapter posting, I suspect there may be more to come in August. As some of you may know from Discord, I work in the education industry making software content that teachers use in classrooms (and I'm quite proud of it). Late July to September is the busiest part of the year for me. This is when we release all of our major updates, as well as prepare for the rush of teachers and school admins requiring support as they start up the new school year. It doesn't help that thanks to a couple of major new product launches and system upgrades over the summer, I'm already pretty burned out this year, so it's definitely starting to take a toll on my productivity...

But alas, onto the Q&A.

Addicted_Reader: What's made you stick with writing Daybreak for so many years?

Well, the short answer is I didn't? More details in this post. But I basically took a hiatus of 3 years from writing Daybreak, because the story had a number of structural issues that grew worse as it went on, and I couldn't figure out a solution until Summer 2020.

But alas, I did eventually return to the story, which I guess makes it different from 99% of people out there?

Part of it was simply the attachment. Even before I had put it on hiatus, I had been working on Daybreak for 3 years. Many of the topics in Daybreak required intense research to write -- the most significant of which being Sylviane's bipolar disorder which made me dig into a number of psychology books and articles of first-hand accounts to figure out. All this research and debating how to represent details in-character has made me rather attached to the story's main cast. This is particularly the case since Daybreak has always been written as a character-driven story, where I'm far more focused on emulating how each character would react to the situational changes in their world, and less on how I want them to act to propel a set plotline forward.

You could say my years playing Paradox grand strategy simulators rubbed off on me. Crusader Kings doesn't plan out a whole plotline. It established characters, organizations, interests, and events, and it lets the world play itself out. This is in many ways very similar to how I approach writing. I have major events in the world that I plan to throw at the cast, but even I'm not sure exactly how they'll react until I get closer to writing it -- when I can really put myself into their shoes and think through their perspectives.

The other reason I write actually has nothing to do with the story. As I've noted in several places, I'm a rather unusual fiction writer as I have very little interest in other fictional stories. I couldn't care less for genre conventions and tropes, which is part of the reason I have no desire to ever go professional -- someone who makes writing their career has to understand the market and their audience, and I don't. Instead, I write as a means of reflecting upon all of the nonfiction I consume, everything from history to sociology to personal management to leadership.

The main characters of Daybreak were all crafted from some aspect of myself, which allows me to use them as a voice to debate the same topics I think about when examining real life. For example:

• Kaede has my spiritualist and stoicism values, my disdain towards materialism, my interests in history, cultural studies, and geopolitics, etc.
  
• Pascal has my intellectual elitism, my interest in civil and military organization, my demand for high standards and meritocratic leaders, etc.
  
• Sylviane has my interest in clothing and the arts, my struggle between childhood insecurities and personal responsibilities. And while I'm nowhere as moody as her (who could be diagnosed as having a mild form of Bipolar II Disorder based on the DSM), I have struggled with dramatic mood swings for most of my life which is what got me interested in the topic of bipolar disorder in the first place.

In other words, Daybreak is basically created by taking some of the voices out of my head, constructing a complete persona around each of them, and putting them on a fantasy alt-Earth world in an epic alt-history social experiment... wrapped into a story for entertainment and convenience of ingestion.

Needless to say, that creates a certain bond between the story and myself. I might have stopped writing Daybreak for a few years, but the voices in my head certainly never stopped arguing and reflecting about real-world issues.

And this is a big part of why I write stories.