Mischa Fox

Writing a completely new work always feels surreal to me. I feel like an outsider to my own imagination.

Every time I start a new rough draft, I fight imposter syndrome tooth and nail. (I’m learning from other writers I meet this is both normal and permanent.)

I could’ve just finished the best thing I’ve ever written yesterday, and opening the blank white document today still causes a heart attack and my mind starts shrieking, “I have no idea what I’m doing! What am I thinking! This will take months, years!”

(All normal, everyone assures me.)

This is a unique time for me though. I’m simultaneously working on two novels (because they both cram my skull and refuse to let me push them aside.)

It’s wild enough feeling imposter syndrome for starting the sequel to the book in agent queries.

But the second is a standalone and takes place in a drastically different setting. I LOVE world building, but this one is demanding to run far afield from anything I’ve built before.

The world doesn’t feel real to me yet, so there’s this… strange liminal feeling. Not here, not there. Not… solid… yet.

It’s a bit like a dream, where only what is in my field of (imaginary) vision is real and the world drops away into fog beyond.

There’s also a tenuous feeling… like the world isn’t solid enough to stand on its own yet. Like a wrong step will crack open a weakness, trigger a fault line, and the whole novel will come crashing down and no amount of resuscitation will revive it.

And yet—

This is also a fun stage. Even if I’m n writing horror, there’s a playfulness to it.

I’m not sure what a character will do— I’m learning about them. What their limits are, their fears, their wants. Entire sections of whatever I learn may get moved or scrapped later. It’s a bit like watching a movie in your mind and wondering what comes next.

This also applies to the world. I’ve only got a few rough stick men populating a sketched stick world. It’s not firm yet. Anything could change. I might not know where they’re going as they take a step forward. Sometimes they will take me somewhere I don’t expect.

If I’m creating monsters or a vastly different world from the one we live in, at this point, I’m most likely to laugh at myself and think, “Wow, this is so WEIRD, no one else is ever going to want to read this—what am I thinking?”

(Also completely normal.)

It takes a minute or two to coax myself back into the mantra of “keep going, keep exploring—it’s okay to write like crap, you’ll revise and edit the entire thing eleventy-five times before it’s done. Just write SOMETHING.”

Then suddenly, the main character character will solidify, and the world (and anything in it) begins to gel together around them and take on substance. Only then does the entire thing stop feeling silly.