Author of Allegory: Part 1

I began writing this project immediately after the ordeal with the crowns and mites. That whole two-month long experience took a whole lot out of me, and made me yearn for a time when I could be myself, and add some imagination to my life. I hadn’t fully expected it to be so draining, but, then again, I hadn’t predicted that the entire thing would be as long as it was. I had thought it would blow over in a couple of weeks at the most. And yet, it had lasted for two whole months.

But what I wasn’t prepared for, even more than the rigor of that search, was for the immense amounts of boredom that resulted afterwards. I became immediately aware of the reason hat Arthur had insisted we begin another quest. After so long of working productively with a specific purpose, it was hard to go back to just doing nothing. So, after a couple of weeks of milling about and trying to do a couple of different things, I made the decision. I would write again.

My last book, Influence, had been annoyingly successful, and my subsequent projects had done very little for me. People seemed to be more interested in my psychology than they were in my poetry and short stories. Part of that, no doubt, was the fact that poetry and short stories are under appreciated in modern society. However, another large part of it was that what the general public had come to expect of me was nothing more than psychoanalysis. I wasn’t providing new, fresh insights with my new work, and they were rejecting it as a result. So, I spent an afternoon trying to come up with a couple of ways to spice up my writing.

I eventually settled on a general idea. What I would write this time would be fiction, sure enough, but it would be a very specific kind of fiction. It would be an allegory, by which I would attempt to get across a couple of my newer ideas about psychology. I knew, from the start, that this would be an immensely difficult way to write. While some of the ideas were already there, formed in my mind or the interactions of my friends, a lot of it would rely on my power to translate that to other characters. And that was a tricky proposition.

I spent another couple of days alternating between talking to my friends and plotting the plot. It wasn’t going to be a very long book, nor was it going to be very complex, but it would be novel length. I cringed a little at the idea that I would be writing a full length novel, but I knew from experience that I could power through it if I needed to. It wouldn’t even take too long, if I knew what I was doing right. I had a lot of free time, and a lot of free time means a lot of time to dedicate each day only to writing. In fact, if I focused, I could probably finish the whole book in about a week. But I decided against that. It would be better not to tax myself too unreasonably, and besides, I wanted it to be a complex and perfect story. So I spent a week outlining the plot in as much detail as I could without actually writing the book.

The night that I finished the plot to my satisfaction, Conrad came to me with some concern about the safety of the house that we were in. They asked me a couple of things about what I needed to learn in order to be able to defend the house in a time of crisis, and I told them that I needed to learn more about how to fire guns. I may have lied slightly in saying that, for the real reason that I wanted some experience with firearms was because a key point of my novel involved one of the main characters having to get over their fear of firing a gun in self-defense. In all honestly, that character was representative of myself and Roxanne.

The next day, I sat down and began to write. Fueled by  combination of coffee and boredom. I knocked out six thousand words that first day. But, I discovered, it was relatively hard to keep on track with writing when the internet was available. So, that evening, as I sat watching the news for Arty, I downloaded an application that turned off the internet temporarily, just in case I would end up distracting myself the following day. Boy, would that come in handy.

The next couple of days I wrote like mad, getting huge swaths of my plot on paper, or rather, in the word document that I was writing in. If felt so odd to watch it go from a couple of pages to around sixty as quickly as it did, but it went remarkably fast. The only problem was that, every so often, I would write for a while and then, later, realize that I had written a whole bunch of typos into it and have to go back through them meticulously, correcting each one. However, aside for those temporary setbacks, work went incredibly fast. At the end of the first week of my writing, I was most of the way down with what I wanted to write. I was overjoyed to realize this.

However, even then, I knew that there were some things that I had written that weren’t going to hold up well. Once every hour or so, an idea would come to me of something that I had written wrong. I wouldn’t correct them in the moment, for I knew that that would take way too much time. But I did make a list of things that I felt needed to be addressed in the first and second rounds of edits. And even then, I was sure that there were errors that I was missing, that were hidden just under the surface of my understanding. I would have to have a lot of my different friends do edits for me to try to ferret out as many of the plot holes as was possible.

At one point, Roxanne walked into the room and asked me what I was doing, during a break in writing where I would reach my hand out to grab at the coffee mug immediately to my left. When I told her, she seemed excited and asked that she would be allowed to read what I had so far. I couldn’t deny her, not after everything we’ve been through together, so I printed out what I had at that time, which was about two thirds of the planned story, and gave it to her to read. I asked her to look at it for any spelling and conventions problems, but also for any sort of major or glaring plot holes. She agreed, and went off to read it, and I turned back to my writing.

It wasn’t much longer after that moment until I finished the writing portion., I pulled a couple of all nighters, and wrote for upwards of twelve hours on some days, although, in many cases, the majority of that time was truly spent listening to some music in the background and staring at my screen, trying to think of what I had to say next. However, by the end of those three days, I had a finished, if not polished, first draft.