The Importance of Obsession by Wendy Trimboli

Every few years I get on a reading kick about extreme mountaineering. The annual assault on Everest by climbers from around the world fills my Twitter feed each May, prompting me to cram more books with titles like Into the Silence and Dark Summit onto my already cluttered bookshelves.

While I have zero interest in donning crampons and oxygen mask to climb into the Death Zone myself, I feel a connection to such inexplicable obsessions. Writers, like mountaineers, relish single-mindedly hurling ourselves toward pointless pinnacles. Obsessions are nearly impossible to explain to others not in the grip themselves, but can afford us a deep well of patience, focus, and endurance. Temporary insanity provides sanity, oddly enough.

I’ve tried writing a story set on Everest—I even have a concept, a tentative character and a title. Every few years I take it out and kick it around, just to see if any new connections jump-start it to life. What I’ve got so far amounts to a decent research paper or vivid vignette. I can effortlessly summon fascinating facts and images, but I still lack important emotional and plot components that will bend a story into that essential peak-shape of rising tension and release.

Different levels of obsession sustain me through different writing projects, and this particular setting has me gripped enough that if I decide to give this story the week of focus it deserves, I could probably mold it into a few thousand interesting words, and maybe I’d even stumble across an adequate emotional payoff during the writing process (I’m picky about my emotional payoffs). However, my fleeting interest in Everest hasn’t managed to sustain me through a novel-length work set at 8000 meters above sea level…yet.

It can be difficult to gauge obsession levels. I can usually tell if I’m in a novel for the long haul when I’m thinking about it all the time. I’ll lay awake mapping my way through the scene I’m going to write when my 5:30 AM alarm goes off. While my body is physically out for a run, or grocery shopping or vacuuming, my mind is immersed in some other fictional world I’ve created.

I don’t always realize my brain is working over narrative problems on a subconscious level until I have a sudden epiphany (“I fixed a plot hole!”) out of seemingly nowhere. When I’m obsessed with an idea, the toughest writing work gets done all day long, not just in the few typing sessions that bookend my day. All available brain-bandwidth is utilized so that the writing expedition can progress.

When I’m not obsessed, writing is a chore that must be scheduled and suffered. Things still get written, but at a slower pace while my internal thoughts churn over mundane, non-fiction concerns. Obsessions are like lightning, and never seem to strike the same place twice. If only they could be easily replicated by retracing the steps that sparked last year’s madness—but alas!

An obsession with a novel-worthy idea also influences my reading, and vice versa, so that they boost each other like amplifying waves. In the months before co-author Alicia and I started our collaboration on The Resurrectionist of Caligo,

I had recently trunked a novel and the forced abandonment of that obsession felt like burying a loved one alive. As I flailed around for a shiny new idea, I read a wide variety of material to fill the void. I chanced upon The Pickwick Papers and spoofed some Dickensian dialogue and descriptions in my private writing exercises, just for laughs.

I had also discovered Pinterest, where I wandered through a virtual necropolis of gothic gravestone photographs from Highgate Cemetery and the like, which in turn led me to pick up books like London: City of the Dead and The Diary of a Resurrectionist. I wrote a few unrelated vignettes, one I especially liked about a girl who haunts a necropolis after dark, safe among the dead while her mother walks the streets for money. Still, like my Everest story, it didn’t go anywhere. I had a character and a concept, nothing more.

When I consider projects that have kept my interest piqued for years at a time, I find that interesting concepts alone don’t provide me enough grist for kicking off a lengthy project. I require multiple interesting character relationships to sustain me through lengthy novel-writing expeditions.

I might spin my mental wheels for months before hitting on a formula that sparks a project into life. Maybe there’s a power imbalance, or dysfunctional romance, or sibling rivalry. Annoyingly, I have trouble pulling these out of thin air, no matter my current altitude.

In 2015 Alicia kicked off my next long-term obsession with our Resurrectionist novel when she suggested a letter exchange writing exercise, in character “just for fun”. We never intended to co-write a novel, but when her character insulted “me” from her very first line (“Dear Snotsniffer,”) the obvious bad blood—a romance gone wrong?—brought an interesting relationship and fresh story threads to the dead ends I’d been kicking around. I fired back an indignant response in kind, from an ambitious graverobber pretending to be a respectable medical student. And since he robbed graves, he would inevitably encounter my little tomb-dancing necropolis waif.

Thus began a new cycle of obsessing, reading, researching, pondering—even a bit of writing. The Resurrectionist of Caligo comes out this September from Angry Robot books, and I admit I haven’t managed to fully move on to my next obsession just yet. Maybe it’s time to get another Everest book down off the shelf, to read and percolate on a fresh story approach, or perhaps I should schedule another forced march in an effort to jolt a promising concept into life beyond an emotionless academic paper. Once a new obsession starts, I’ll keep slogging up the trail to the summit, or “The End”. It’s happened before, and it can happen again.

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