There is a strange period in the life of a story when it belongs completely to you.
Before the cover… Before the title is finalized… Before someone can search for it online or hold it in their hands, there is a version of the story that exists almost entirely between the writer and the page.
For nearly five years, that was Contingents for me.
I was young when I first started writing this story. I certainly wasn’t sitting down with the intention of creating something I would one day publish. I had an idea with characters I wanted to understand and a world that slowly grew larger the more time I spent inside of it.
And, like most first drafts, the original version looked very different from the story that exists today. Characters changed, relationships changed, entire pieces of the world disappeared and were replaced by something better. Things I once considered essential eventually became paragraphs I deleted without hesitation.
But somewhere underneath all of those changes, the heart of the story stayed. Kate was still Kate. Axel was still Axel. And year after year, I kept coming back to them.
That’s one of the strangest things about writing a story over a long period of time: eventually, you stop remembering when certain pieces appeared. I couldn’t tell you the exact moment every character became who they are now. They simply grew alongside the story, and in some ways, alongside me.
A Story Grows With Its Writer
Five years is a long time to spend with fictional people.
During that time, my writing changed. My understanding of people changed. The things I wanted to say changed. I became more interested in why characters make certain decisions rather than simply what happens next. And Contingents changed because of it. That’s something I don’t think I understood when I first began writing. We talk so much about writers developing their stories that we sometimes forget the opposite is happening, too:
The story is developing the writer.
Every rewrite forces you to understand something you didn’t understand before. Every character asks you to consider a perspective outside your own; every plot hole reminds you that wanting something to work doesn’t necessarily mean it does. Eventually, you look back at the person who wrote Chapter One for the first time and realize that person couldn’t have written the version you’re holding now.
She had to write the messy one first.
Giving It Away
Perhaps the strangest part of publishing Contingents has been realizing that these characters aren’t entirely mine anymore.
Of course, I know what happens to them. I know the things they’ve done that readers haven’t discovered yet. I know what they’re afraid of, what they’re hiding, and which tiny details matter more than they currently appear to.
But readers get something I don’t: they get to meet them for the first time.
Someone can love a character I never expected them to love. Someone can distrust a person I desperately want them to trust. They can notice something I thought I hid perfectly, completely misunderstand something else… Or even develop a theory that never crossed my mind.
And I can’t stand over their shoulder and explain what I meant. That’s terrifying. But, it’s also kind of wonderful. Because maybe that’s the final step in writing a story.
You spend years creating a world that exists privately inside your own imagination. You learn every corner of it. You rearrange it. You protect it. You obsess over whether you’ve told the story correctly.
And then, eventually, you open the door…
The reader walks in.
And the story becomes a little bit theirs, too.