Can two stories haunt you at the same time?
To the point that working on one feels like cheating on the other. It feels like I am having an affair.
Not the kind that ends in confessions or consequences. The kind that happens between weekends, in the quiet hours when the novel is open on my desk and another story is sitting in the corner of the room, watching.
The novel has a plan. Clear structure, a protagonist I understand. I know where it goes. The second story has none of that. Just a pull. And a protagonist I cannot stop thinking about.
This is not the kind of thing they teach you in writing workshops. They tell you to finish what you start. To commit. To not lose the thread. Noble advice. Disciplined advice. The kind of advice that assumes the writer is always in charge.
But the writer is not always in charge.
I kept accusing myself of lacking focus. Kept telling myself it was a discipline problem, a distraction, a writer’s version of doom-scrolling. I had the plan. I had the structure. I just needed to sit down and honour it.
Except I love both protagonists. Not in the abstract way you appreciate a well-built character. In the way that makes you want to know what happens to them, urgently, even when you are the one who has to decide.
So here I am. Juggling. Not gracefully. But not ready to let either go. There is a risk in dividing focus. Books do not finish themselves.
Yet there is also risk in flattening instinct for the sake of efficiency. Maybe discipline is not about denying every other desire. Maybe it is about knowing why you choose one over another, and accepting the consequence.
For now, I am not renouncing either story. I am watching where this divided loyalty leads.
Why do I want to live inside these two worlds? What is it that a story world offers that the actual world, increasingly, does not?
The more I watch people, online and off, the more I see something I cannot quite name. A kind of convergence. Everyone responding to the same stimuli. Everyone performing the same version of themselves. Not because they are dishonest, but because the architecture of how we live now rewards mimicry. Someone does something, it appears compelling, the herd follows, and slowly the original is buried under a hundred imitations.
We are factory-producing versions of ourselves and calling it expression.
A story world resists this. Not because it is fictional, but because good characters are irreducibly themselves. The villain does not become a villain because villainy is trending. The hero does not change because the audience expects otherwise. They are who they are, shaped by their wounds, their wants, their contradictions, and they follow that internal logic to wherever it leads.
That is rare. Outside of fiction, it is almost extinct.
And here, finally, is the answer I was looking for. If the external world rewards conformity, the story world rewards specificity. Two characters are refusing to wait not because I lack discipline, but because they are fully and inconveniently themselves. They will not be put in a drawer until the other one is done.
Is it healthy? I do not know.
But I am starting to think that is the wrong question. The more useful question: is it honest? And to that, I have no argument.