How The Road Between Us Found Its Shape

The first version of this book opened with the catastrophe.

It was the obvious place to start. The sky tears, the grid dies, and a hundred million lives change in an afternoon. I wrote it that way, on and off, for twelve years, and it never worked.

The problem wasn't the scene. It was that I had written a spectacle and called it a story. A civilization ending is an event. It is not a feeling. No matter how well I rendered the collapse, and I rendered it several times, at length, the reader had nobody to stand beside while it happened. They were watching, and watching is not the same as fearing.

So I cut it. All of it. The book now begins after the noise, with two people who cannot stand each other standing in the same room, and a walk neither of them wants to take.

That decision reshaped everything downstream. Once the story belonged to Dustin and Christine rather than to the end of the world, the scale had to shrink, and the detail had to grow. Hunger instead of famine. A swollen ankle instead of a collapse. What it costs two people to trust each other on the fourth day, on the ninth, on the day one of them is too tired to lie about how bad the wound has become.

This is why the road novel is the oldest form we have and the hardest to fake. Nothing can happen except what happens between the characters, and they cannot escape each other because the world is doing the escaping for them. There is no war room to cut away too. There is a road, there are two people on it, and one of them knows something the other does not.

The other thing that changed: the wider conflict moved to where it belongs.

There is a hidden world in this series: two factions, and a war running between the surface for eons, and a catastrophe one of them helped cause. All of it is real, and all of it matters. But Book One does not explain it. It shows you a country where the disaster has already happened and the reasons for it are still in the dark, which is precisely what the characters are living through. They don't know either. Neither should you. Not yet.

I understand that costs me something. Some readers will reach the last page wanting the machinery explained there and then. The answer exists, and it arrives across the next volumes, in the order the story earned it. Book One closes with an epilogue that provides a strong hook into Book Two and lays out the underpinning of the whole series.

What I gained was the first book I could hand to my sister-in-law with trepidation, who doesn't read much science fiction, and have her tell me that she couldn't put it down and had to read the first nineteen chapters in one sitting.

That trade was worth making. It took twelve years and more drafts than the NFL has ever had to see it.

My takeaway: Start with the people. The end of the world can wait its turn, because inevitably it will happen.