🚀The Dark Age: A novel is a long walk
Hello, friends!
We’re halfway through January now. Time seems to move at a rapid clip these days. I attribute this mostly to the pandemic. Our family hasn’t stopped isolating since the whole thing began in early 2020. Every time it seems the world might be emerging from this rampant season of virus and death, numbers begin to climb again, and it just makes sense to keep playing it very safe. My working from home makes this easier than it otherwise would be, and I’m grateful for that. We’ve chosen to homeschool Squish this year, which means she’s not wrapped up in the outbreaks and school closures that are sweeping through our county currently. As a result, every day’s shape resembles the shape of the day before. Whole weeks and months zip by. When I’m in a writing lull, it’s easy for that lull to extend itself without my noticing.
Recently I reactivated our family’s Hulu service, simply so we could watch Only Murders in the Building. Soon after, though, I discovered a little British series called Staged, which is told entirely through virtual meetings. In this show, two actors—David Tennant and Michael Sheen, each playing a version of themselves—join a series of Zoom calls hosted by a director; pre-pandemic, they’d been working on a play, and now, while they’re stuck at home, they decide to keep rehearsing, so that when the lockdown ends, they’re ready to offer entertainment to a hungry public. Except lockdown does a serious number on these two, and as a result, they hardly manage to rehearse a single page of the play without launching themselves at one another’s throats. The show has only the barest of plot structure: Ostensibly, these folks would like to successfully rehearse their play. That’s it. What happens instead is that the show is drowned with character, not plot. And I kept watching, even though nothing was happening, because I liked spending time with these characters.
It occurs to me that this is a thousand percent what The Dark Age ought to strive for. The plot, what little of it there may be, is just scaffolding on which I hope to stretch these characters. What’s supposed to happen in this book? A crew of astronauts is supposed to find a new home for the people of Earth. Okay, fine, dandy. It would be a mistake, though, to structure the book around this goal. What matters infinitely more are the characters connected to this goal: The father who doesn’t want to be on the journey, whose heart implodes when he thinks of the family he left behind; the mother, denied her dream and stranded on Earth with a child she didn’t ask for; the child, isolated from her parents emotionally and physically, who wonders why she exists.