Everything Except the Novel: How I Made My Book the Long Way
Author Don Schechter shares how he completed his novel after trying to tell his stories in other formats first.
Some are born to be authors, some work really hard to become authors, and I had authorship thrust upon me.
There's a newspaper spread that's been on the wall of my studio since 2015. Matt Damon. Emily Blunt. Leonard Nimoy. And me. Four faces in the Sunday arts section of The Boston Globe.
Don't look too closely. If you do, you'll see that the article titled “Raven Ascends” describes me as a local filmmaker who showed a short film at a festival in Vermont. Not that impressive. And here’s the secret: I'm the one who contacted the reporter out of the blue. I submitted the photo.
The story of how Ascendants finally got written is, in part, the story of earning legitimacy.
The universe of Ascendants began in the early 2000s with a single scene that arrived fully-formed in my head. It was vivid, specific, and attached to absolutely nothing. No world. No explanation. Just a few moments I couldn't shake and couldn't yet understand. It took years to build the technology, the society, and the fractured family at its center.
So I wrote a script. I thought to myself, “I'll make a feature film. I'm a filmmaker. I founded a production company. I teach this. I know how this works. It can’t be that hard.”
The budget suggested otherwise.
So I made a short film instead, one story set adjacent to the main narrative that teased a much larger universe. It screened well. People responded. Rather than shopping the script around like a sensible person, I made another short. Then another. Then a fourth, after a town in Vermont gave me a grant to produce it. Each one has its own distinct style, each story's characters living in the shadow of The Jacobs Institute and the impact that Ascension technology has on ordinary people. The stories were about unyielding faith, life, death, and the weaponization of technological innovation.
Somewhere in the middle of film three, I thought I understood what I was actually doing: I was world-building in public. Testing the mythology. Finding the edges. In reality, I was deferring telling the story at the heart of it all.
I was not writing the novel.
The films were packaged as the Ascendants Anthology, screened at festivals across the country. The audiences kept telling me the same thing: This should be a TV show. Managers, would-be producers, Hollywood execs all said something more specific: If you want a path to television, the book needs to exist first. Hollywood options a property. They don't option an idea.
So when COVID hit in early 2020, I finally sat down to write and was overwhelmed by options from the existing material.
The second short, Raven, follows a character named Sebastian: a brilliant, morally compromised scientist who walks into a Resistance camp posing as a prisoner but is the one pulling the strings. I had always known where Sebastian's story ended. But I didn't truly know his voice until I heard it.
Johnny Lee Davenport was cast for the first Ascendants short from a recommendation. I was immediately taken in by his deep voice and deliberate speech. His physical presence. His commitment to every line, every silence, every look. He was a 16-season veteran of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, a man who had played Othello, Hamlet, and Henry V on stage, and Deputy Marshal Henry in The Fugitive on screen.
I wrote Raven, specifically to hear Johnny Lee speak. When I sat down years later to write Sebastian's scenes in the novel, I wasn't working from notes. I was listening to my friend.
Johnny Lee Davenport died of leukemia on February 2, 2020. The book is dedicated to him.
When the manuscript was finally done, I needed blurbs. From people whose names meant something to readers of speculative fiction. I reached out to Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and futurist whose ideas about the Singularity and technology are woven into the story. To Dr. Erin Macdonald, the astrophysicist who serves as the science advisor for Star Trek. To Derek Tyler Attico, whose own science fiction I had admired.
They said yes. I was grateful and relieved.
But there were other emails. To Andy Weir, author of The Martian. To J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5, a man whose work I have taught in my classroom, whose quote, “waiting gets you nowhere,” I have probably cited a hundred times. I have spoken those words to students who are younger and better-resourced and more certain of themselves than I was at their age.
I stared at those draft emails for a long time.
The rejections came, as they mostly do, not personal, not unkind, just the reality that people at that level protect their names carefully and say no to nearly everyone. I knew that going in. What I hadn't anticipated was how much the asking itself would cost me, the moment of typing out who I was and what I'd made and why I believed it deserved their attention. That act of self-declaration, repeated over and over, is where imposter syndrome lives. Not in the rejection. In the send button.
I pressed it anyway.
The early reviews of Ascendants have been interesting. Some readers love it. Some don’t. The ones who don’t love it have almost universally said the same thing: The book works best…as a TV show.
I’ve pretty much come full circle. I’m okay with that.
Check out Don Schechter's Ascendants here:
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