A moment of clarity?
September 1, 2025
Sitting in my sunroom.
I am working on a play I’m directing – Pride and Prejudice. Just took a moment to sit back and breathe. Smell of grass, sound of cicadas, sunlight playing all over my make-shift desk.
A sensation rushed at me--one of those moments when you don’t quite know if it’s an actual premonition or just a really hard wish. They’ve come a few times in my life. The world goes slow motion.
This image was of retirement; working in a peaceful place, all my own. My dream is to write. Recently, fiction. The desire to publish a novel, or rather to write compelling stories and share them, has consumed me. It was a dream long dead, until --
On a whim, my sister Beth and I attended a writing retreat at Interlochen in “the top of the mitten.” It was an amazing week. I have found a new writing partner in my friend and sibling.
Since then, we have both been obsessed again with writing. Beth’s tends to be more autobiographical. Mine – personal experiences morphed for stories outside of my world. But what does one do when they haven’t really written anything but stage plays the last twenty years?
I came home and finished a piece I’d worked on in my 30s. The writing is not great. The characters have lived and pleaded with me from the back of my brain. The first draft is finished. It is, I recently learned, what is called a mid-grade fantasy. With no magic. ?? A little girl falls through the sidewalk and discovers her voice in the world. Vivid, circus-like, Fellini-esque people, inhabiting an empty city with the landscape of Chicago. Kind of a modern Alice in Wonderland but with characters like a Beckett play. Think Coraline, if you know that story.
I finished the damned thing! Now revisions and second draft. So I had to learn more about revising, editing, story structure. The internet was helpful. I cannot count how many videos I watched. Here are a few of my favorites:
Bookends Literary Agency
Alyssa Matesic
David Perell
Abbie Emmons
BookFox
Keiren Westwood
Occasionally StoryGrid
And then there are the books. I’ve been reading craft books like mad. Success in writing and directing stage-plays has given me a decent sense of story and character dialogue. But my prose writing feels stilted to me sometimes. It’s nice to learn from EVERYONE that the rollercoaster of confidence is normal.
I admire my sister’s writing. It always evokes strong emotions and has a lovely circular feeling to the structure. A touch of magic. I manage that in short stories – but a novel!?
I had read Bird by Bird and Writing Down the Bones. Here are craft books I devoured in the last year:
On Writing – by Stephen King
Save the Cat! By Jessica Brody
A Swim in the Pond in the Rain – George Saunders
Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donal Maass
Creating Character Arcs: The Masterful Author’s Guide to Uniting Story Structure by K.M. Weiland
The Linchpin Writer by John Mattew Fox
Story Genius by Lisa Cron
Advice to Writers Jon Winokur (compiled and edited by)
Story Engineering by Larry Brooks
Loved every minute of them, even when they had opposing views.
One of the things that I’ve also been obsessed with is AI. I know folks who use it to write most of their work. I get uneasy when they tell me. I’m trying to figure out why.
I mean, I hear “I don’t enjoy the writing part.” When I’m in the zone there’s nothing like it. It’s like being connected to an alternate universe; possessed by an actual writer! So when I hear someone doesn’t like the writing part, I can’t relate. I believe them, I just don’t know why you’d want to be a writer. I have what I think are great ideas in my head. I think many of us do. But the thing that separates writers is – well, learning how to tell those stories. Letting someone else do it seems to me like you hired a ghostwriter. Which is fine. But you didn’t write it, right? Tons of arguments online about all that. I’m researching it. Right now my biggest selfish beef with it is – I’ve always used em dashes. (overused them, yes, but still) Now, like the American flag at a hate rally, some unknown power is stealing that personal thing from me.
So, AI has been on my mind. One night, when a friend said they were using AI to self-publish their 3rd book this year, I was silent. But that sinking feeling began to put a story in my head. I wish there were a better way to describe that phenomenon.
I had to check myself. They had published something. I mean I could self-publish, but it would take so long because of the way I write. From my own head. A book can take one to two years – or twenty. Was I just jealous?
Everything went slow motion for a minute. In wafted a feeling, a notion – an uneasiness. Pieces of a desire knocked at doors in my brain, past experiences came out to play and together they created this picture, this moving picture which then fell apart and came together again, and grew.
That’s what it is like for me. And the ideas begin to occupy half of my waking hours. Little things come crowding in to color the picture, to extend the canvas. Before I know it, I need to get it down for fear it will leave if neglected.
The title came quick –– I don’t know why or from where – Electric Possum. It’s a story about a literature professor/writer. (oh no, so much for publication) She is at odds with her world. Books are now all written with AI; listened to on disposable earbuds. She is in danger of losing her job at the university because she is behind the times in teaching literature. She is a dinosaur – like some drama teacher stuck in Shakespeare and Chekhov. Anyway, the story she’s writing came from an experience I had while interviewing as an Acting/Shakespeare teacher at a university in a new city.
What’s it like to leave everything you know and go to, in this case, Mars? So that’s the story she is writing.
But who the hell will read it? The pressure to abandon the “classic” way of storytelling, to abandon your Earth, to find a new thing. Isn’t that what progress is? But what if you have to leave trees forever? How the hell do you do that? So, that’s what I went to work on at Interlochen Writer’s Retreat. Once there, the possum hid. It hissed something like “Who wants to read speculative fiction about a writer?” and waddled to the back of my brain to sulk.
Instead I found Esther and WeeJee. It was a prompt based on two pictures of 1) an old pick-up and 2) two ratty kids. All the doors in my head sent stuff out to play. I never wanted to stop writing. The 20 minute prompts and exercises just weren’t enough. This story just came at me. And so I left with three potential books in need of writing, revising and/or conceiving. And a play to direct.
What’s a girl to do? School called. Rehearsals. Blocking grids on my back porch, at the place in the picture. Bookends’ video inspired me to think about a website. I have one for theatre, susanfelder.com.
I so want to dream, to prepare for when the dream of writing evolves into reality. So I spent hours creating three imaginary book covers. (you know, instead of writing) The mid-grade draft has had a ton of names, and I just can’t settle on one. I’m told a publisher might have a lot to say about that. So, not stressing over it.
Every kind hostage who’s heard about Electric Possum can’t wait to read it – even my non-reader/tech-guy nephew. My sisters want to know more about what happens to 3-year-old WeeJee in the other story. He and Esther are driving a 65 step-side Chevy pick-up from Ohio across the heartland to find their grandpa in the Las Vegas desert. Esther is twelve.
And so today, I sit back on Labor Day, after some good labor on Pride and Prejudice, and feel this stir of dreamer’s adrenaline. Could my life look like this? When I retire? Like a sunroom with time? It does today, on the porch in Cincinnati Ohio, where the dream of working here became a reality, even though I left the world I’d known -- my view of trees still intact.