Complexities

I recently read a wondrously creative scifi novella, THE LANGUAGE OF LIARS by S.L. Huang. I loved it, and that detailed recommendation will be included in my next monthly roundup. Even past the end of the story, a sentence appeared that resonated with me. In the book's acknowledgments, Huang writes, "This book had such tight complexities that I sometimes despaired I could ever make its many fragile gears fit."

This puts into words exactly what I'm struggling with most every writing day. Yes, tight complexities! Yes, fragile gears! Yes, despair, so much despair! It's inspiring, of course, to recognize that Huang made it through the same struggle as me with the parts successfully assembled into a great story. So did all the other authors of all the other books I love for their clever intricacies. Inspiring, but it doesn't solve any of my self-inflicted novel problems.

I've given myself so many challenges with this story: the future setting, the invented technologies, the amount of science in this fiction, the number of characters, and the several plotlines that need to intersect and affect each other. It's way too much, really, and I've had to scale some of it back, but if I remove too many pieces, it all falls apart. Decisions and changes in one area create repercussions elsewhere, and I keep thinking up new questions and ideas that make me want to rethink everything. Particularly my choice to write this novel, or any novel.

But I persist. Because abandoning this novel would surely pain me more than continuing. And because the difficulty level of the complexities is what excites me about the story and makes me believe it's worth finishing. And because, despite all the despair, I must enjoy doing this work, since there are zero outside forces driving me.

Sometimes, though, I do fantasize about setting this novel aside for a while and turning to a more manageable one that I could complete first. Something simpler, maybe something about... time travel. Then I sigh at myself and get back to work.