I'm the god of my universe

Why a Novel and Why Right Now?

I am, as I said in my last post, giving my level best to novel writing these days. Someone asked me recently what made me make this shift and I thought I’d talk about it (though calling it a “shift” feels a bit more final than I feel comfortable with).

The shift began about 30 years ago, when I read my first young adult literary novel. The YA fiction of Madeleine L’Engle (in particular, the Austin family series) was my first exposure to stories that were less plot driven and more people driven. It wasn’t the stories that Vicky and her family and friends were living so much as the stories beneath the stories they were living. Beneath plots of intrigue or political misadventure, they (in particular Vicky) were exploring faith, science, poetry, doubt, fear, and more. Any good book should do this but many don’t, offering up plot as the factor that drives page turns. Who dies? Who falls in love? Who wins? Who loses? These are the elements that make a book popular. But what makes a book beloved is the people within the story.

So the shift began for me way back then, when I found camaraderie in characters on the page. I have always been fascinated by the ways authors bring their own selves to their characters. Wendell Berry as Jayber Crow. Flannery’s character of the grandmother in A Good Man is Hard to Find. Madeleine as Vicky. David James Duncan as the obscure Kincaid. Like therapists, authors often become so because we are trying to unveil the layers of our own experiences in the world. We write, as Flannery said, to find out what we think.

And I think that fiction is the best way to do this.

Ex. 5 - Mind's I: Translation #12, 1965, Jess, 1923-2004

I said to a friend the other day that writing non-fiction has always felt like writing from the stall for me, while writing fiction is feeling like writing from the pasture. In many ways I wrote (and kept writing) non-fiction, specifically spiritual non-fiction, because it was a slot machine I knew I could play and reliably win. There is a form to that kind of writing in particular that is, for lack of a better word, formulaic. It’s plug and play. And because we are always trying to better understand ourselves and the world, to locate ourselves and our stories, our drives, passions, fears, and more, spiritual writing in particular can follow that form ad nauseam. I said to my agent in January that if I had to keep following that form, I was going to quit writing entirely. Not because it wasn’t a reliable income, not because I wasn’t capable of it, but because it was not only killing my creativity, it was smothering my faith.

Acknowledging that, the smothering of my faith—which has always been a flickering candle anyway—was the thing that clinched it for me. If I kept at this, I was going to break my faith down into such smithereens that there would be nothing left.

I needed to keep some mystery if I was going to keep calling it faith, otherwise it wasn’t faith anymore, it was science. I love science but science isn’t faith and trying to confuse the two often results in the loss of the latter.

I read this line from Emerson a few weeks ago, “The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the universe, which runs through himself and all things.” A few days later, my agent and I were talking about some plot arcs in the novel and I asked if I could do a particular thing and his reply, right on point was, “You’re the god of that universe.”

This is what writing a novel is doing. Instead of pushing myself closer into faith, writing a novel pulls me far, far away from it. It is making me wrestle with not my own faith, but the full gamut of the lives of others, asking what will they do when they don’t get the thing they want, what are they driven by, discouraged by, and defeated by, what the god of their universe would do for them and with them and in love of them. There is no god character, no omniscient narrator, they are free to tell their own stories, their own inner workings and wrestles, they are free to tell the truths they believe and to shield the truths they’re afraid to face. And you can’t do that in non-fiction, not really. And that’s why I’m not “making the shift” (because who knows, this could be a total flop and the last fiction I write), but it is why I had to write this book right now.

Someone asked in a comment if I could give the elevator pitch of the story and I’m not ready to do that yet. It could be a long, long time before this sees the light of day, although I’m hoping to have a first draft to give to a handful of initial readers by the end of the summer and then spend the fall/winter reworking it, and hopefully—she says with crossed fingers—have it ready to pitch by early 2026. We shall see. We shall see.

Thank you for caring, truly. You are all so supportive and I really mean this when I say the Wilbert family could not do this without you. This is the first year since 2019 that I haven’t had some portion of a book advance coming in (book advances usually pay out in two or three installments over two+ years), and Substack is my only source of income right now. I don’t say that to guilt anyone into paying to read, but just to stress how much your continued commitment to being here means to our family. We do not live extravagantly, we pinch our pennies, we live on a budget, and we need both of us working. So thank you, I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I feel the belief you all have in me and it’s evidenced by your generosity.

If you’re reading this in email (which 98% of you do!), consider pressing the heart (♡) at the bottom or top of this email. It helps my work get more eyeballs on it, which is nice for me and kind of you!