A.T. Sayre on “The Last Days of Good People”
A.T. Sayre never set out to write a novel, but we’re thrilled he eventually did. In this blog post, Sayre discusses the genesis of his
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A.T. Sayre never set out to write a novel, but we’re thrilled he eventually did. In this blog post, Sayre discusses the genesis of his first novel, The Last Days of Good People, which we are pleased to feature in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]
The Last Days of Good People is my first novel. And it was written by accident.
This story was never supposed to be a novel. A novelette, maybe a short novella, that was what I thought I was writing. It was all I thought I could manage, actually. I like to consider myself respectably productive writer who manages a healthy annual output, but before this novel I had never written any single piece longer that 11k words.
It’s not that I never intended to write a novel, because of course I did. I have ideas for them like all of us do. But novels weren’t my thing. They still aren’t, really. I will read them, a friend’s book, a classic now and then, the occasional contemporary who’s burning up the paradigm, but I don’t think I ever actually tried to seriously write one in my entire life. I’ve always been way more about short stories, especially the last few years. So writing a novel of my own was the last thing I expected I’d do. Wanted to do, even. This may sound like a wild thing to say, but if I had known in the beginning that Last Days would turn into a novel, I might not have even started.
I remember that first day writing this one, back during the pandemic (that’s me in a lockdown—some people learn to bake bread, others start day-drinking as a vocation, I accidentally write novels). I sat down at my computer, opened up scrivener, looking to start out on this idea I had been mentally composing the last few days. It was a good idea, a story I liked, with moments and scenes I was genuinely excited to put down, and overall well-formed enough in my head that I thought it was time to take a crack at it.
I wrote 500 words or so that first afternoon; not the most productive writing day I’ve ever had, but not terrible. As I got to a good stopping place for the day and went to make dinner, I said to myself, “Not bad, shows some promise, should end up around 15k words in total. A bit long for a novelette, but OK.”
But then a week later I blew past that length and was barely out of the first act.
So I thought, “Okay, it’s gonna be a novella. That’s fine, not a problem. Maybe it’ll be 22k words long. That’s a good length for a novella.”
Then a few days later I blew past that number too.
“30k,” I told myself. “That is that absolute limit. It can’t possibly get longer than that.”
But it did, just a handful of days later. And it just kept going.
I still don’t understand how it happened. Which is nuts—I was there, I was writing it, and I was seeing in real time how it kept getting longer and longer under my fingertips. But I still can’t explain it. I wasn’t adding anything to the story that I hadn’t originally thought of, wasn’t expanding on anything on the fly. The plot points in the story were for the most part coming out pretty much as I had them in my brain. There were no new characters, no flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood, no jewel heist b-plot, nothing like that. But the story just refused to end.
The only thing I could do, and did, shortly before the story passed 37k words with no end in sight, was throw up my hands and say, “Fug it, it’s gonna be as long as it gonna be.” Then got back to writing and gave up trying to estimate.
I still don’t understand how it happened. Which is nuts—I was there, I was writing it, and I was seeing in real time how it kept getting longer and longer under my fingertips. But I still can’t explain it.
It did finish, eventually, after six weeks or so. Which was also pretty nuts considering I’ve had stories a tenth its size that took me longer to write. And what I had when I tapped out that final sentence was not a long novelette, even a long novella, but quite by accident, my very first novel. A problematically short novel by current market standards, where if your book isn’t thick enough to stop a bullet at point blank range it’s too short, but still a novel. One that was almost four times longer than I thought it was going to be when I started.
Clearly, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
But at least that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m doing it wrong. Because Trevor and Emily liked what I managed to write enough to take up a major portion of the current issue all by itself. Which as hopeful as I was when I sent it in, still shocked me when they took it. That’s a lot of space in one issue to devote to a single dumbass. I’m shocked every time they take one of my stories, to be honest. Amazed that I am apparently an Analog caliber writer. Even now, after five Analog publications in the past four years, including now a friggin’ novel, I still don’t fully believe it’s true. But hey, who am I to argue? I’ll just keep smiling and cashing the checks.
I like this story. I like this world, I like these characters, I like how real the way they deal with the situation feels. I like everyone’s imperfect decency. I like the tragedy. I like it all a great deal. It’s not exactly what I envisioned when I started, even beyond my horrendously off estimates on its length, but no story ever is—the translation from thought to language is always inexact at best. But I got pretty damn close here, I think. If anything, what I wrote in this story might actually be a little better, deeper, than what I had originally conceived.
The Last Days of Good People is, for me at least, a story about best intentions, both the real and the performative, and how they are often not enough to correct a universe that, as unaware or uninterested of your existence as it is, still seems out to kick your teeth in at every opportunity. And you can rend every garment in your closet over it for all the good it will do—which is none at all. The universe does not care about your moral stand, your sense of right and wrong, and some events once set in motion will transpire with or without your approval. And because of lack of authority/power, skill, foreknowledge, or even just a basic inability to alter the laws of nature, there is nothing you can do about it.
The most you can hope is to improve things around the edges, win your little battles, and mitigate the damage you can’t prevent as much as possible. That’s what Warin is doing, when he faces a situation that is incredibly unfair, horrifically tragic, and well beyond his ability to change. All the characters are doing the same—through their own perspectives, with varying degrees of success, failure, morality, and utility. And it is how you face the situation that tells more about you as a person than whether you succeed or fail.
That’s what the idea was supposed to be, at least. How well I got that across I dunno. Perhaps if I had in fact added a jewel heist b-plot it’d been more clear.
