There's a joke I like to tell about my creative process that goes along the lines of "God airdrops ideas to me." I have ADHD, so intrusive thoughts are a recurring issue for me. Just the other day, I was sitting in biology class when out of nowhere, I had the thought: the third side of the horizon. Those words captured my fascination instantly.
So what does that mean? Well, obviously a horizon has two sides. The symbolism of the third jumped out at me immediately. The third side of the horizon holds what no longer exists, or what has never existed in the first place. The first explanation I offered myself as to what the third side of the horizon meant was the afterlife.
I'm deciding where to employ this new idea. If I stick with the theme of death, one of my options is my novel, Twenty-Seven Towers. I've been looking for a title for the sequel I haven't even gotten to yet, and this suits the series perfectly. The other option available to me is a standalone short story or poetry.
Twenty-Seven Towers is my masterwork. It's my magnum opus, always the height of my abilities. I've been writing Twenty-Seven towers for nearly three years. It has changed so much since I was a seventh grader. It began as the story of a young military official rejoining the army of the towers after the death of her lover. I began writing this book with nothing but a title in mind, and the rest of the story began blooming from there. I found a setting, pseudo-dystopian North America in a fantasy world, and a plot, and a cast of characters. They came to me naturally with just a title and a few stray ideas.
I divide Twenty-Seven Towers into three divisions to separate my over 200 drafts into categories. Each division is a separate story with separate characters as my imagination reworks the novel. The first is distinguished from the others because of the involvement of a love triangle. Aurelia Caltis is a widowed commander who's heart is torn between a spy and a soldier. She is lost in the wilderness on the border between two hostile countries with the soldier while the spy searching for her. In some iterations of this version, clones are involved, asking uncomfortable questions about the morality of cloning and using them to preserve the life of the original person.
At some point, Twenty-Seven Towers underwent a massive shift. I can't rationalize the change or even pinpoint when it happened, but suddenly, Aurelia became Arcelia, her last name became Lyan. Both of her love interests disappeared in favor of someone totally different. The existing plot was overturned entirely. Instead of a military story about a pair of soldiers lost in the midst of a war, it became a powerful governing woman scrambling to save the man she falls in love with from both the government she works for and the morally disputed rebellion in her dystopian world.
I liked this plot, but some of the major plot devices were tickety in logic at best. So the story changed again, and all Arcelia kept was her name and a vague remembrance of her title. It became a lesson in grief and motherhood as her love interest became a newborn baby, nephew of her deceased husband and marked for death. I got away with this because the love interest in the previous plot was an object at best. I could have replaced him a notebook containing the same information he did and the plot would have been the same. In the third incarnation of Twenty-Seven towers, I chose a baby to be the hinge of the new plot to show the readers the human side of Arcelia, a brutal killer of a leader, instead of providing them with cheap romance.
So that brings me to today. I'm in something of a fourth iteration, as I've completely undone Arcelia's backstory and replaced it with something easier to follow and more meaningful. The change was absolutely crucial in completely changing the frame of the story and the characterization of the main character. The original story involved Arcelia and her benevolent sister fleeing through the countryside, trying to escape Arcelia's biological family (who are hunting her down) by crossing the border from her original country to a neighboring one. The current backstory is a retelling of a defiant girl raised in a cult worshipping gods from a religion that had been lost after the apocalypse a few centuries ago, and her escape into the real world. The two biggest differences between these backstories are the apocalypse and Arcelia's family unit. This new history brings questions of religion, morality, and family into the novel, all while Arcelia struggles with the loss of her husband and the guilt of putting her career over their relationship while he was alive.
I'm at a difficult place with Twenty-Seven Towers right now. I'm entering a fourth division of Twenty-Seven Towers, and everything will change. In my head, I am revisiting and reinventing the plot every day. Because of the touch-and-go nature of it right now, I'll most likely save "The Third Side Of The Horizon" for a poem in my collection or a short story for writing contests.
If I take the route of a short story or poetry, I have an immediate idea in my head. For short stories, I envision mountains and waterfalls, and a person dwarfed by the majesty of the world that surrounds her. Again, the third side of the horizon inherently involve loss and reason. I imagine a young woman hiking through the California mountains with a group of her friends after losing a loved one, maybe a sibling or her partner, and discovering herself.
I'm considering a few threads of plot. Maybe the woman gets separated from her friends, spinning the story into a struggle of survival for someone who doesn't have much motivation to live in the first place. Maybe the group of friends stay together and face a challenge together, bond over something other than loss while addressing it. I want to write something compelling.
Above all, I want to write about the human condition. The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself, according to George RR Martin. I couldn't agree more. Some of my best short stories are about day-to-day humanity. The story of two music students from wildly different backgrounds, the story of a terminally-ill boy slowly losing his ability to play the piano, the story of four strangers who live in the same city but never meet, going through the same universal struggles, the story of a girl in love with her best friend as she watches him tear himself apart to conform to society's standards. The stories of our people in our world, or the story of one woman in a world entirely of my own creation. Those are my options. I'm lucky to have such strong themes to choose from.