The Story I've Been Carrying for Ten Years

I'm not a writer. But I finally have a novel.

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I need to get something out of the way first: I don't write. I've never written. I got a B- in college English, I haven't finished a short story in my life, and the last creative thing I produced was a surprisingly decent toast at my brother's wedding that I rewrote eleven times over three weeks.

But I've had a story in my head for a decade.

It started the way I think a lot of stories start for people like me — with a character who showed up one day and wouldn't leave. She was a cartographer in a world where the geography kept changing. Not metaphorically. The mountains moved. Rivers reversed. Cities you'd mapped last year were now in the wrong place, or gone entirely. Her job wasn't just to chart the land — it was to keep track of what was real.

I knew her name. I knew her voice. I knew the scene where she realizes the maps aren't wrong — the world is. I could see the moment so clearly it felt like a memory. I knew how her story ended.

What I didn't know was how to get any of it out of my head and onto a page.

The Blank Page Problem

I've tried. More times than I want to admit. I've opened Google Docs at midnight, full of conviction, typed a paragraph, stared at it, hated it, deleted it, and closed the laptop. The gap between the story in my head — which felt vivid and alive and important — and the words I could actually produce was so wide it was demoralizing.

The story in my head had atmosphere. It had the smell of wet ink on parchment and the sound of a compass needle spinning uselessly. It had the weight of a woman realizing that the institution she'd devoted her life to was built on a lie.

What I wrote had sentences like: "Lena looked at the map. Something was wrong." Technically accurate. Completely dead.

I tried ChatGPT once. I gave it a prompt and it gave me back something that read like a fantasy novel written by someone who'd only ever read the back covers of fantasy novels. Competent, generic, and nothing like the story in my head. It was the right genre in the wrong voice. I closed that tab too.

What Changed

A friend sent me a link to Skeinscribe and said something like "this is different, just try it." I'd heard that before about every AI writing tool that had launched in the last three years, so my expectations were approximately zero.

But I tried it. I typed something like:

"Lena is a cartographer in the Royal Surveyor's office. She's been mapping the same coastline for six years, and this morning the coastline is three miles east of where it was yesterday. Nobody else in the office seems to notice."