So last week I was in Israel/Palestine, traveling with the BYU study abroad group, seeing all the sites and everything, when my flash drive crashed. Real bad. This friend of mine on the trip who’s a data recovery expert downloaded all this software and tried to help, but the drive was not only completely wiped out, it was completely unreadable. Most of my stuff was backed up in various places, but I lost, among other things, my summer journal (NOOOOO!!!!!) and my working copy of The Wormhole Paradigm.
However, this was exactly what I needed to get things moving in the right direction…
The problem with this story has been that it’s just…too boring to me. I started the first draft when the story ideas were really new and fresh–and not very well developed–so I did a lot of discovery writing earlier on. I would write ten thousand words, figure out what the story was really about, go back and rewrite it from the beginning, then figure out that it was really about something completely different, etc etc.
The problem with this latest draft was that I was doing too much cutting and pasting from the older, more obsolete drafts. The main character’s personality in the newer drafts is significantly different than the earlier ones, but I really want things to lead up to this one scene, which means that I need to find new motivations, new weaknesses…and cutting and pasting just was making things too choppy and inconsistent.
I figured I’d plow on and fix it in the rewrite, but that wasn’t really working for me because I didn’t have good grounding from which to launch the rest of the story. Without a good, solid setup, my ability to discover the story as I wrote it was really hampered.
What’s worse, I found myself getting bored with the story as I was writing it. This was perhaps the biggest sign that something was wrong. Sadly enough, it’s not something that was really new–I was getting bored with it even as I was writing it back in the winter. The conflict just wasn’t strong enough, the world was too bland, there wasn’t enough mystery, etc etc.
In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I almost scrapped the story altogether and started working on my other idea–the one with the Mormon pioneer trek in space. I have a LOT of really good ideas for that story that I’d like to start putting together soon. With that story, I feel like I’ve got all the ingredients laid out on the table but I haven’t turned on the stove yet. When I do get to writing it, its’ going to be a lot of fun!
However, there was one thing that made me decide not to scrap this story and start with a new one. That thing was the main character. He’s a lot like me, in that he feels insecure sharing feelings of affection with members of the opposite sex, and for that reason alone I just HAD to explore him as a character and tell his story.
I’ve been experiencing a lot of personal growth here on this study abroad trip, and I think that my experience here parallels the character’s struggle in this story a lot better than it does in the other one. In the other story, the main character is basically a young boy struggling to forgive his mother and father for abandoning him. In this story, the main character learns that he has deep feelings and personal needs connected with this girl who is his colleague, and that it’s ok to satisfy those needs rather than always trying to live up to the expectations and desires of others.
I didn’t lose everything when my flash drive crashed, though. I still have the stuff I uploaded to livejournal, the stuff I submitted for English 318, and the working draft as it existed at the end of the winter semester. The only thing I really lost was a draft that wasn’t working out for me.
And that was good, because it got me thinking in a more global way about the story. I started to figure out what it was that’s making it boring, and said “well, what if exactly the opposite thing happens?”
Basically, at this one point in the middle, the two main characters find out that they’re not really in unexplored space, they’re really close to Earth–just seven million years in the future. The main character has something of a crisis as he realizes that the REALLY important mission is to go and explore the future Earth, not explore this unknown planet where they are. This causes him to have a break down.
However, this piece of information eliminated a lot of the mystery and made the setting a lot less interesting. So, as I was thinking about the story after my flash drive crashed, I thought to myself “what if they really are in a sector of space close to Earth, and all of the stars are exactly where you’d expect them to be EXCEPT for the star system that they’re in? What if this star, with its planet and the remnants of an ancient civilization, were NOT supposed to be there? What if the whole star system just popped in out of the blue?”
This was kind of scary, though, because I honestly have NO idea how or why this would happen. It forces me to think about the story in a new way, and changes the universe of the story in ways that I don’t yet understand. However, this is exactly what I need because its helping me to come up with new, original, exciting, and interesting ideas to revive this story.
Besides that, a whole new idea has somehow worked its way into my story, something that could contribute meaningfully to the discussion in the sci fi community about the dangers of uninhibited AI and the singularity.
We always assume that a fully autonomous AI will be either hostile towards humanity or benevolent. It’s a classic theme in science fiction: robots as the worst enemy of mankind or its greatest servants. But if they saying “reason is a slave to the passions” is true, wouldn’t that mean that AI would be neither? Is passion something that you can program into a machine, or is it part of our “wetware” as human beings that makes us unique? If you can’t create a passion-driven machine, then even if that machine is self-aware and has unlimited learning capacity, it will lack the motivation necessary to move and shake the world. Basically, you’ll end up with these superhuman robots that are so apathetic that even without any safeguards, they won’t be dangerous. Giant robot AIs endlessly traveling the void of space without any motivation to use their super-powers to aggrandize themselves.
That idea slipped in because I needed something to keep the tension high towards the middle of the story. Basically, the main characters arrive at this star system and realize that it’s abandoned, while the real thing of interest is Earth, several dozen light years out of their reach. But floating around in an empty star system is…boring. When they arrive at the planet they start to discover some cool stuff, but until then, there’s just not a lot of conflict or tension.
So I came up with this idea: what if an unidentified ship arrives unexpectedly in the system and then heads out to one of the outer planets, where they can’t study it? They send out a probe, but the ship shoots it down. Then, as they travel towards the third planet with the remnants of an ancient civilization, the unknown ship travels at relativistic speeds from one planet to another, and they don’t know why. When they arrive in orbit around the third planet, the ship finally heads towards them, and they get to see it up close.
That’s the kind of tension I need. Combined with the mystery of “what the heck is this star system doing in the middle of known space?” you get plenty of reasons to keep reading the story. And with these new ideas, I finally feel like this story is gaining some momentum. I’m not bored with it anymore–I feel like I can write this!
And so, in honor of a new start, I decided to finally come up with a new title for this story. And so, my friends, I present to you: Genesis Earth! Cool title or what? Let me know what you think!
