When I was twelve, I tried to write my first novel on my dad’s Apple IIe home computer. I still have those first few chapters printed out on an accordion of continuous-feed paper. Alas, I never finished that novel, about a young man who discovers that the entire Earth is a spaceship, which he has mistakenly become the captain of. Nor did I finish the next novel, about a dwarf, an elf, a mage, and a fighter going off on a totally original adventure. I also didn’t finish any of the dozens to follow.
Starting was much easier than finishing, I discovered, kind of like running a marathon or summiting a very tall mountain. I could sit down and begin a new novel every day, each one full of more potential than the last, but getting to the final scene proved impossible for me. The middle pages were never quite as exciting as that opening paragraph.
You see, it wouldn’t have been enough for me to merely finish a book. I wanted to finish with a flourish. I wanted to craft the kind of climactic scene that I loved in my favorite novels, where a dozen disparate plot lines come together and wrap up neatly, but logically. I wanted characters to be challenged to the brink, to overcome long odds in a believable manner and triumph, but not without great personal cost to themselves and their loved ones.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card was my gold standard at that time. A galactic war won by children, who were about my age when I first read the book, and it was somehow completely believable. The book also had a massive twist at the end that made perfect sense. And the toll on the characters was so great that they would never be the same after. The plot had changed them. Going along for the ride changed me. This was the kind of book I loved discovering. It was the kind of book I wanted to write.
Twenty years later, I finally pulled it off. I finished my first novel, Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue. This book had everything I loved as a reader. In a way, I wrote it for myself, reading as I went along. I watched the action unfold. I wondered how these characters would escape their predicaments. I fell in love with imaginary people that somehow came out of my own imagination. Most importantly, I finished the novel in a way that I was proud of. Because without an ending, I couldn’t share this novel with friends and family. I couldn’t expect them to come along on this journey with me.
You’ve probably been there as well, haven’t you? Standing in the book store, looking at a series of novels you’ve heard great things about. And there are eight of them so far, and you wonder when (or if) the ninth one will ever come out. Should you dive in and hope it wraps up okay? Or wraps up at all? Will you have to wait years and years between sequels, forgetting most of what has already happened in the previous books?
We readers have a strange relationship with the books we love. We want more of our favorite tales, but please make them different from each other, but please don’t fuck them up, and please give us lots, but please don’t go on forever, and please end thousands of pages in a way that’s super tidy and satisfying and give us exactly what we expect, but don’t let us see it coming. Good luck.
Welcome to my life around February of 2012 as I sat down to write Shift. My novel Wool had somehow become a New York Times bestseller, even though it was still a self-published book with some truly questionable cover art. Ridley Scott had snatched up the film rights. Publishers were offering me hundreds of thousands of dollars to take the book off my hands (the offers would soon reach seven figures). Reviews and fan e-mails were pouring in, asking for more, more, more.
I had twenty years of not being able to finish a novel under my belt. I had thirty years of being disappointed with sequels as a reader. At the time, Eminem’s song “Lose Yourself” was popular, and I would jam the song every morning, firing myself up so as not to waste this opportunity. And then I decided to write a book that absolutely no one was asking for.
No one except me.
A word of advice here: If you love reading, you should really give writing a chance. The blank page can be whatever you want it to be. A sad scene, a happy scene, a love story, a tragedy. It’s all right there. You are in charge. You make the rules. Delight your every fancy. Right your every literary wrong.
Shift gave me a chance to do something that I think most authors are wise to avoid, but that I really wanted as a reader. I wanted to know how the post-apocalyptic world got the way it was. I wanted a solid explanation that was also engaging and entertaining. I wanted to believe that this could happen. And I wanted to know whom to blame.
I also wanted Wool to stand on its own, because the ending was just what I’d aimed for. The problem with a direct sequel is that it robs the previous book of its conclusion. Turns out, the characters have to get up the next day and put on their pants. Probably not as exciting as slaying the dragon and finishing the quest. Sequels start with a bit of a letdown. They start with an admission that the epic adventure you just took is merely prequel to something even bigger and bolder! The problem is that Neo fighting hundreds of Agent Smiths will never in any universe be as emotionally powerful and satisfying as Neo fighting a single Agent Smith.
No literary compliment has ever surprised or delighted me more than my agent Kristin Nelson telling me that Shift was her favorite book of this series. I was terrified while writing this novel. Part of me wondered if I was trying to subconsciously sabotage my writing career because it was blowing up too quickly for me to handle. But the truth was that I wrote the book that my history as a reader taught me never to expect. A book that took risks with my expectations, that dared to answer as many questions as it raised, a book that gave the villains a voice, a reason to be loathed, but also to be understood. A book just for me. But Kristin’s response to this novel reminded me that I am not alone. When we write for ourselves, we often find a bigger audience than we intended.
Over the years, I’ve toyed with the idea of writing another trilogy set in this world, books that continue the saga of the silos and their inhabitants. There is so much more to say and so much more to explore. But the challenge of starting something new isn’t just that I need to finish it well, it also means that the conclusions in the prior book weren’t conclusions at all. Wool ended exactly where it needed to. Juliette deserved to enjoy that moment, to wrap up her own story, not to have to get up the next morning and pull on a pair of pants and look for another dragon.
It was the dragon’s turn to have his say.
But you’ve delayed long enough. Now on to Dust. Because Juliette won’t wait forever.
About the Author
Photo © Christopher Michel
Hugh Howey is the New York Times best-selling author of many novels and short stories, including Wool, Shift, Dust, Beacon 23, Sand, Machine Learning and Half Way Home. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have sold more than three million copies worldwide. Howey divides his time between New York City and