Or so I thought.
A lesson on the origins of storytelling would follow, a lesson that I was slow to realize and appreciate. I used to think of storytellers as authors absconded away in remote cabins, pecking out stories in solitude, which they then delivered to readers bound and on a platter. The truth is that storytelling has almost always been an oral tradition. There is supposed to be a live audience, and the energy of that audience influences the storytelling and even the story itself.
Heresy! many authors cry. The art must stand alone! No one may influence the endeavor!
Which makes me wonder what kind of awful art those people create. Art is influence, and it works both ways. The audience gasps, and the storyteller knows they struck the right note. They laugh, and the storyteller knows their wit landed a blow. They snooze, and the storyteller recalibrates. It is the joy of theater and live music that the audience plays a role in the energy received, absorbed, augmented, transmitted, transmogrified. Any live performer will tell you this. Any live audience will agree.
Wool was originally the first seven chapters of the book you hold in your hands. Technically it was a novelette, too long to be a short story and too short to be a novella. It was nothing, really. Some self-therapy. Until I discovered I was not alone.
I tossed the story online and priced it at 99 cents, the lowest option available at the time. I would have gladly made it free if I could have. Once I published it, I forgot about it. I went back to my novel. I did zero promotion. The cover art was something I threw together in five minutes, though I would not blame anyone for assuming it was more like three.
Within weeks, I noticed something strange was happening. My online sales dashboard, which usually ticked up one or five sales a day of my various novels (enough to buy a coffee and keep the stories coming), had suddenly gone up a dozen. The next day, a dozen more. Then by the dozens each day.
A thousand copies of the original Wool sold in a single month, a number that was absolutely astonishing to me (and to anyone who knows anything about how books are meant to be sold). The next month, 3,000 copies flew off virtual shelves. I was making roughly 35 cents for every copy sold, so this was real money to a guy who made $300 a week before taxes shelving other people’s books (yeah, seriously).
I didn’t understand what was happening. As far as I could tell, no one I knew was talking about the story. It wasn’t my friends and family. I certainly wasn’t telling anyone about it. And then I noticed the reviews. Oh my god the reviews.
They were almost all five stars, and they all had the same complaint: Where was the rest? Where could they find more?
There was no more. Spoiler alert: Holston is dead! Allison is dead! There is no more story to tell. My dog died and I was broken inside and I needed to put myself back together one sentence at a time. Little did I know that my therapy was really a group session. Something about this world I had created and these emotions I was venting had resonated with a random reader, who had told someone else, who had written a review, who had accosted one more person to read this damn thing, it’s only 99 cents, you can finish it on your lunch break, and so on.
Yes, the story has twists that keep most readers second-guessing themselves. Yes, in a world of twist endings the idea of playing it straight caught most people off-guard. (I spoil the story in the first sentence, let’s remember!) Yes, there is nothing more to tell. But readers asked me to tell it to them anyway.
It was October of 2011. I had a novel outlined for the upcoming NaNoWriMo, an annual tradition that involves writing a fifty-thousand-word novel in a single month. I’d participated in the last few of these, writing novels like Molly Fyde and the Land of Light, Half Way Home, and The Hurricane. That year, I was going to write the fourth and final Molly Fyde novel. But as sales clicked past 1,000 on October 31, I decided to heed the reviewers clamoring for more. I dashed together a hasty outline. I started with the few named characters who were still alive (Marnes and Jahns), but I had in mind a new character, one who lived deep down inside me, who had always been there, who could fix even the most broken of things, and who would rise up with hope and audacity and make things right in my world and hers.
Juliette was born that month. Out of the ashes of my grief, formed by an interaction with my audience, art and story bouncing back and forth from the speaker and the hearer, this novel took shape. Over the month of November, I wrote parts two, three, and four of this book. In December, I began work on part five. By January, every bit of this story was published online and rocketing up the bestseller charts. I only ever combined the stories into a single novel because a few readers complained about having to click five times to get all the parts.
The simple truth is that I never would have written the rest of the story without you, the reader. I never would have known we were going through similar things, feeling the same stuff, longing for similar stories. The following year, I started to better understand the word-of-mouth that allowed me to become a full-time writer when I went on book tours and met my audience in person. I heard how people fell in love with this serialized tale and told all their friends and family to read it. I met people who bought dozens of copies and sent them to everyone they could think of. I met the people who wrote the reviews imploring others to discover this world, Juliette’s world. I realized that the success of these books came as much from the reader’s reaction to it as from what skill I exerted there.
My life has been forever changed, not just because I’ve been able to do more of what I love and tell more and wilder stories since, but because of my appreciation for the storytelling and story-loving animal in all of us. We crave human connection. We long for stories that drag us through agony but give us a glimmer of hope. We want to read disaster stories that teach us how to survive. Above all, we are hooked on the relationships we form with our favorite fictional characters, and the relationships we form with the authors who create them and our fellow readers who adore them as much as we do.
This story lives and breathes in its current form because you haven’t stopped. Because of you, the book continues to find new readers year after year. Because of you, perhaps there will be more. A TV series, maybe. Another trilogy of life beyond the silos for any who dare to hope. Or more short stories about life in other silos. It’s impossible for me to say. It’s all up to you.
For those who left a review or told a friend, thank you. For those who are about to leave a review or tell a friend, I look forward to seeing where our journey takes us next. It might be a journey through a broken world, but there’s a Juliette in each of us, ready to make things right.
Hugh Howey
Quarantined in Silo 06
Portugal, Earth
02020 AD
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