Anyway. The more I tried to get the characters in the story to enact the behavior that would lead to their relationship’s demise, the more I found myself spiraling outward to describe their entire world. How else could I show how death had infiltrated their lives and ruined their capacity to connect with each other? How else could I dissect the woman’s overempathizing and intense projection of her own fears onto the man’s grief? How else could I find out how to distribute fault? To get there I surely needed to first describe a whole society where, for instance, there are no grief rituals to handle death; everyone is in their twenties and thirties and has no intergenerational ties; awareness of climate change forecloses the future imaginary; gentrification is destroying the capacity for creative freedom (which extends to the creativity required for love); everyone feels like they are subversive while role-playing the gender dynamics and social hierarchies they’ve inherited; charity is the only clear expression of empathy; and so on.

I got carried away by the world-building. I told myself that the relationship was still the nexus of the story, its reason for being, but each time I got close to the lovers I found myself zooming out and inventing some new corporate scheme or technological development or subplot. Eventually a friend suggested that, the validity of world-building aside, I was maybe trying to distract myself from the thing I still didn’t want to look at: that wound at the center of it all. I had started writing the story to make myself deal with the inexplicable sadness of death and heartbreak, and still hadn’t dealt with it. Worse, two years into writing a full-length novel, I hadn’t allowed myself any closure for those old feelings, because I was still picking at the wound.

The main character of the novel, unlike me, is a scientist. She is employed by a biotech think tank, where she studies self-replicating cells that are programmed to multiply in particular patterns on command. But she does not work with the real, organic cells; she examines how they behave in a computer simulation. She runs the simulation again and again to predict how the cells will behave. She has no reason to believe the simulation will not accurately predict the real behavior of the cells—but there is always that infinitesimal chance that they will not follow their preprogrammed course, that the simulation will turn out to have been faulty. She can’t help but suspect that there is a mysterious element that cannot be accounted for in advance.

This might be a decent metaphor for writing a novel. Even for those writers who have every paragraph outlined before they begin (not me), there remains a tiny element of the unknown when you set the simulation in motion. You can only create the conditions for something to happen, and plan for that thing to happen, but you can’t ever be completely sure—unless you write the whole fucking book. You have to carry out the experiment.

the book has a writer with an implied reader, consumption goes in one direction, and everything that happens in the book happens in the book. It is hermetic; it contains itself.