The Shell, Up Close

Analysis & Workshopping An Evolving Narrative

Welcome, all, to this special debrief!

The Shell is a piece of short sci-fi fiction that I recently concluded writing and publishing here on Substack. It was planned to be two to three parts long...and ended up expanding to seven, which was both unexpected and exciting for me as a writer!

Because this piece ended up being more popular and more well-received than I thought it would be, people had questions about the writing of it, and I’m happy to discuss how the process of this story evolved over the past few weeks.

If you like geeking out over storycraft—or you simply enjoyed The Shell and want to know more about it—read on!

NOTE: If you enjoy more in-depth analysis of my work and process, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! Future workshops like this are likely to become an exclusive perk, so if you find this valuable, we would love to have you join the crew!

Photo by Gidon Wessner on Unsplash

A quick word from Captain Obvious: the following contains SPOILERS for The Shell. If you don’t want the story spoiled for you, please read it first!

The Idea

A logical first question about any story is: where did the idea come from?

This is a little tough to answer, though!

For me, ideas are rarely a one-and-done thing. It usually starts small, just a little germ of a thought, and then evolves as I let it percolate. Because my fiction is so often character-driven, I don’t usually start writing an idea into a story until I have a strong, vocal personality of a protagonist to follow around.

In this case, the initial germ was probably something simple, like, “What if you could 3-D print people? How would that realistically look? What applications would that be used for?”

But when Burgess “arrived” in my brain, the whole story fell into place pretty quickly.

Incidentally, I love writing about older people, because they have built-in context for everything they do, everything they believe. Burgess felt tangible and “vocal” to me in a way I haven’t experienced since the Henderson family in my short story The Book. And he told me his story, not the other way around.

I developed an outline pretty quickly after that, and we were off to the races!

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The Inspiration

My regular readers know that I don’t write a lot of sci-fi. It’s outside of my usual comfort zone. To develop this story, I pulled from some of my favorite science fiction influences, both direct and indirect…and mostly from the world of film.

The direct influences for the technology in The Shell came from:

• The Fifth Element: especially the scene in which Leeloo is “printed” at the beginning. But I couldn’t quite figure out how printing the genetic body would also include the memories and cognition, so that led me to…

• Black Mirror (especially episode “San Junipero”): in this show, consciousness is uploaded and replicated in various ways in various episodes, and this is where I got the idea for the “snail” part of the shell tech, which includes the memories and the inner workings of the brain.

More indirect/tonal influences on the story came from:

• Looper: I watched this film for the first time about a week before starting to write The Shell, and I’m fairly certain that the film had a strong tonal influence on this story. Especially in the way that tech advancements flourish in the urban areas while rural living remains relatively untouched (a real fascination of mine in futuristic stories).

• Minority Report: This one is a longtime favorite. I just love how the tech in this movie is secondary to the people, and how humans use and abuse advanced “perfect/infallible” systems for their own emotional gain. This film definitely had an effect on my thinking for the use of the shell in vengeance.

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The Locations

A quick word about setting, because setting is—for me—always one of the most important pieces of any narrative puzzle.

All of the locations in this story are real. There is a relatively sizeable prison east of Seattle, in Monroe, and those small towns—Sultan, Gold Bar, Startup, Index—all lie along the highway leading across the Cascade Mountains that Burgess travels on, to and from work. This is an area I’m fairly familiar with, having spent many happy summer weekends camping with my husband in those mountain woods.

Not only that, but the abandoned summer camp? That’s real, too! My husband discovered it while backwoods camping near Lake Wenatchee and he and I explored it a few times over the years. A very eerie place, but also very inspiring. Many stories could be set there, for sure! I changed the layout ever so slightly to make it fit the story, but the place is real, and it was so fun and fulfilling to bring it to life and fill it with a cast of colorful characters.

To me, setting is as much a character as anything. This story wouldn’t be the same if it was set in another area, another state, another country. I wanted to evoke some of my fondest memories of traveling through central Washington, of how it differs from the lush green of the state’s western region where I was born and bred and still live.

I hope I properly captured that feel.

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The Outline

Okay, now we come to the elephant in the room.

Why did a projected two-part story turn into SEVEN parts?? That had to mean that the story changed quite a bit in the writing, right??

Well…yes and no.

It may surprise you to learn that the outline didn’t change at all, really. If you were to look at my notes from the start of writing, you would recognize the general narrative as being the same. It wasn’t the framework that changed, but the pacing.

See, that climactic scene in the woods in Part Six? That was planned from the start. I knew that’s where this story was heading. But after writing the first two parts, I realized something: if I dropped that climactic scene into the story too early, it wouldn’t read as cathartic. It would read as melodrama. Unearned emotion. And I didn’t want that.

So certain offhanded statements in my outline, like, “Paul joins the community” or “Burgess is conflicted” couldn’t be glossed over. They had to be shown, expanded, explained. Burgess’s thought processes and motivations in particular needed to be thoroughly explored. Otherwise, we wouldn’t forgive him for holding a gun on an innocent man and marching him into the woods to his potential death. We needed to feel conflicted but empathetic, and that buildup of tension requires something I like to call emotional scaffolding. It’s the stuff that holds up the stuff. It’s the stretching of the rubber band. You pull it as tight as you can before it snaps back into place at the climax. But you can’t do that properly in a short time; it needs to breathe.

Hence, seven parts.

That said, I do like to build a lot of wiggle-room into my outlines for the story to surprise me with interesting answers to narrative questions. One of my favorite examples from this story was the catalyst that would eventually lead Burgess to double-down on his desire to kill Paul, right before the climax. I had left this open in the initial outline, but I assumed that Paul would do or say something that would anger Burgess enough to override the potential fond—or at the very least accepting—feelings he was forming for him.

It wasn’t until I got closer to that moment that I had the idea: what if Paul thinks Burgess might be his father? This would be a viscerally awful thing for Burgess to hear and contemplate, and would bring his grief crashing back in. And it would heighten the emotions, too. That’s the kind of thing you don’t always plan for, and it was such a cool moment when it fell into place.

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The Panic

Don’t be fooled: it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It never is, right?

Between Part Four and Part Five was quite a large gap in the publishing, and that was because I started developing The Panic, my term for a type of writer’s block.

A quick aside: I don’t like the term “writer’s block”, because it’s too vague. It’s like saying “I’m sick”. Okay, but what are you sick with? If you don’t know, you can’t treat it properly. There are lots of different types of writer’s block, and they all have different cures.

In this case, my block wasn’t “what comes next?” but, instead, questioning my instincts about what I knew was supposed to come next. I started worrying that the story wasn’t sci-fi enough, interesting enough. That it was too slow and contemplative rather than “fun” or compelling.

During this time, I came up with a handful of seriously dumb ideas for how to change the story to be more interesting. These included more action elements, new characters, plot cul-de-sacs. I am SO GLAD I didn’t move ahead with any of those! They were all panic-inspired and had nothing to do with the story I was telling.

The cure for The Panic? Time away from the story to reset your brain, and eventual reorientation. I sat down and read through the entire story up until that point, and it helped to remind me that this is Burgess’s narrative. He’s telling me. All I have to do is shut up and listen and stop worrying so much. The slow, methodical, character-driven feel was the entire point.

The story proceeded as planned, and the rest is history.

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The Alternatives

A handful of folks mentioned in the comments that they worried (or assumed) this story would go another way. More tragedy, more horror. Paul would remember and turn bad, or Burgess would kill him, or Burgess might even harm himself. And there is a world for each of these stories to have existed, for sure, but I want to do a quick storycraft workshop about why that did not/could not happen in this story, as written.

Let’s talk about this story’s theme/narrative questions.

First, Burgess is both our protagonist and our villain. He is the force that moves the story forward, who has the strongest goal and motive, but he is also not a great person. He is distorted through pain and grief to the point that he wants to kill someone, and to go to great lengths to do so. And no matter how much we might understand his reasons, that’s still generally accepted as a bad thing, both in fiction and in real life.

• It’s important to remember that “protagonist” is a morally neutral term. Protagonist does not mean “hero”. The protagonist is simply the character with the most agency of action in the plot, while the antagonist is the protagonist’s chief obstacle in that movement.

• If this story has an antagonist, it’s Naomi. She is Burgess’s obstacle to getting what he wants, even if neither of them realize it. She is his foil. She accepts faster than he does that you can have something good, even if it wasn’t what you expected. She lives out the lesson he must learn or ignore.

Second, Paul doesn’t actually matter, as a character. Harsh? Maybe. But forensically—from a storytelling perspective—this is true. Paul is a blank slate on purpose. He is not so much a person as he is a mirror of Burgess’s grief. In thirteen years, that grief doesn’t look the same as it did when it was fresh. And neither does Paul. Paul is an “innocent stranger”. The reality is that Burgess will never, ever have the opportunity he always wanted, to face the real Paul Lannigan down, force him to confess his sins, and kill him. That was never going to happen.

For Burgess, the key narrative question is this: can you accept that you’ll never have what you wanted? But—like Naomi talks about—you can have something different? And maybe even make it better if you try?

In fiction, I love the power of an unanswerable question. I think so much can be gained from a character needing to accept that some things will never happen and find a different path. Some of my favorite stories contain this element. There are no tidy answers in a story with this kind of theme, and I like that. It’s not about what’s attained and confirmed, but about the potential inherent in changing your mind and accepting a new path through the world as it’s handed to you.

Now, because I think it’s valuable, let’s workshop the horror/tragedy angle, real quick, to show the contrast in how the theme would play out.

In a tragedy, Burgess’s pain and negative belief about people and family would be proven right, confirmed. That Paul was bad all along, that family can’t be remade. He would have received an answer to what I think is an unanswerable question. Either Paul would be revealed to be the real villain, or Burgess would cross the line and become irredeemable. And while there’s room for a story like this to exist, it would have to have been written by another writer…because I don’t believe in that worldview, at all. The question hanging in the air is everything, to me. The nihilist would need to answer it, and to say, “Yes. You’re right to fester in your anger, and you’re right to let it destroy you.” But I didn’t see that, for Burgess. I believe that he has the capacity to live on with what he’s been given. I believe that for all of us, really. In that sense, I don’t think a tragedy would have been “honest”, especially coming from me. It would not ring true.

However! I will say that the start of this story really could have been a great setup for a horror story. I did think about that while I was writing. But again, it would require answering questions I think are better left unasked. And ultimately, I don’t think Burgess would have been the right protagonist for that kind of story. Instead, Naomi could be interesting! Think about it: her elderly neighbor prints this mysterious young man, she becomes infatuated with him, and then it’s revealed that he’s actually a murderer, and she has to figure out how to stop him before he wreaks havoc in the isolated community.

Now that would be fun, right?? Creepy!

But a different story, for sure. Not Burgess’s.

This is why theme, motivation, and narrative questions are so important. One little change ripples out in amazing ways, and as writers, we get to play with outcomes in a way that is either satisfyingly positive, or satisfyingly dark. But this requires real thought and care to handle correctly. I truly hope I did so!

What a responsibility, eh? Still, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

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The End

I know I’m probably guilty of overstating these things, but I really am so grateful to you all for your willingness to accept my experiments, even ones that get away from me a bit!

I hope I’ve answered all of your questions about The Shell, but if there are still any lingering things you would like explained or clarified further, please feel free to drop them below and I’ll do my best to respond.

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to more fun fiction experiments in the days, weeks, and months ahead!

Your grateful storyteller,

S.E. Reid