I Can't Stop Making Up Stories

On a Novel I'm Sharing One Week at a Time and Why

Yesterday I started a brand new experiment for me: sharing a serialized novel, one chapter at a time, here on Substack. It’s a novel I wrote back in 2021. You can find the first chapter HERE—it’s called, “The Quiet, the Quiet.”

Why go this route? Why not have my agent shop it around? Why not self-publish it in book form and then sell it at our book shop? Why not hide it in the metaphorical drawer (my laptop) and leave it there forever?

It all started when a Sunday school teacher read a book to us when I was six or seven years old. I had never heard anything as amazing as that story, so that night I begged my parents to buy me the entire boxed set from the church bookstore for $11.92, and they did, and that’s when I fell in love with books and reading and stories.

I read those books over and over, and one thing that never settled right with me was the storyline of the oldest daughter and how she fell away from the story. I just didn’t like her absence.

This leads to the first reason I wrote “Funny Games We Used to Play”: I wanted to explore this story but with a nameless protagonist, when she is an old woman, and figure out what happened to her.

In a letter to a young fan, Lewis wrote, “Haven’t you noticed in the two you have read that she is rather fond of being too grownup? I am sorry to say that side of her got stronger and she forgot about Narnia…There is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end – in her own way.”

In another letter, C.S. Lewis wrote,

I could not write that story myself. Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country; but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?

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Another reason I decided to write and publish this in serialized form is that I love interacting with an audience. I love the immediacy of publishing online. I love knowing that my stories are being read.

And I love the discipline of sharing my writing—it becomes so easy to write fiction and keep it hidden because I don’t think it’s good enough or I’m afraid of what people will think. It takes a bit of courage to share our creative work with the world, and I like leaning into that.

I also love the element of play that happens in a serialized novel—I find myself writing the chapters more playfully, knowing I have to keep the readers attention each and every week. What can I put in that will keep you coming back? How can I end the chapter in an intriguing way? If this is about Susan (but I can’t really say it’s about Susan), what breadcrumbs can I drop to hint at that?

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Above all else, writing this is a creative experiment. Maybe it will be a complete bust and no one will read it or enjoy it! I’m completely okay with that, because I’m having fun thinking about it and working on it. Of course, I hope people like it, but that can’t be the main thing—as Rick Rubin says in The Creative Act, “The audience comes last.”

You can find the first chapter HERE—it’s called, “The Quiet, the Quiet.”

Any questions or thoughts about this serialized novel?

And how long until I get a cease-and-desist letter from C.S. Lewis’s estate?