By Anne-Marie Yerks
If someone had told me ten years ago I would someday write a science fiction dystopian novel, I would laughed them out the door. Sci-fi was not my thing: I had always been happily cemented in the school of dirty realism, and Mary Gaitskill was my goddess.
But then I began teaching in a grad-level creative writing program, one that attracted speculative writers from around the country, and every grading session required complete suspension of reality. My students’ characters traveled around in time, danced with fairies, endured sword attacks, grew fins and horns and fangs, and acquired about every special power imaginable. Their enthusiasm for speculative worlds challenged my own attachment to contemporary times. It seemed the dirty reality I dwelled in was exactly what they were trying to escape.
So I decided to wander outside my literary comfort zone. A short story I’d published with Five on the Fifth had a speculative plot about cats infused with a fictional psychoactive herb called cheather, so I decided to expand that idea into a longer work. For the novel, I gave these cats an owner, a young girl named Isla, and plopped them into a dystopian version of my grandparents’ farmhouse. Stupidly, I began writing without an outline or synopsis. Bad idea! I was soon lost in a tangled and directionless story set in a rural futuristic village called Naudiz. Everyone rode around on a bus and bombs kept blasting for no particular reason. It was a true mess, but the story kept pulling me back and I managed to complete a first draft.
Many heavy revisions and six years later I sent the novel, then called The Punctured Girl, to a few publishers and agents. One compared it to “Never Let Me Go,” by Kazuo Ishiguro, but also rejected it. Another said they’d loved the premise but found the beginning boring. So I revised again, spending entire weekends slashing and cutting and rewriting and incorporating new plot elements, eliminating characters and entire scenes. I became desperate for cohesion, terrified that I’d spent so much time and energy on a story that just didn’t work. Dirty reality sounded pretty good at that time, but I kept on going.
With the help of beta readers, I reworked the story again and finally my dystopia was ready to fly out with a new title — LUSH. After another round of submissions, I received two offers from small publishers and chose Odyssey Books of Australia. Even so, I still felt slightly worried the novel hadn’t yet realized its potential. Well, that kind of worry is what good editors are for. The one assigned to my book wrote a nine-page critique that slapped me back to revision land. The edit letter shook me up, but after such a long road I could hardly quit and, soon enough, I saw that the minor changes my editor recommended attacked problems I knew existed but couldn’t solve with my writer shades on.
In the end, I know one thing for sure: The dedication on the first page — “to my students” — couldn’t be more true.
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