The Author’s Private Multiverse

My favorite characters always die.  It all started with Leslie in from Bridge to Terabithia and it hasn’t let up ever since.

But I get it.  Sometimes, a character needs to die for the sake of the story.  In many cases, as with Leslie, a character dying is kind of the point.  A book that is an exploration of grief obviously needs to build up to that moment and make us feel it.  And I’ve certainly done my share of killing off characters I loved, both in book form and in video game stories.

It’s a strange vantage point, being a writer.  The stories we write aren’t just a singular thing for us.  They’re a multiverse across drafts, a story that morphs in our minds and on the page, evolving as we futz and flounder and unfurl parts of us we weren’t even aware of until they stare back at us from the page.  Most of our readers will never know about anything but the canonical end result.  But at least for me, that’s never how stories work.

In early drafts of The First Whispers of Fate, Aideen was just impulsive. There was no Beast. The murder conspiracy was more complicated. The island had no Tagata, but rather a monestary. But it’s not just the little things that change in between the drafts.

I wrote the story for Unconquered, a video game that is currently on the backburner at Goo Monster Studio because it’s just too big and ambitious for the studio right now.  It’s a science fiction tactical RPG, modeled on tabletop games.  But the story is about grief and loss, about culture and tenacity, about fatherhood and growing up.  I have 2 versions of that story sitting on my hard drive.  In the first draft, Character A dies in the first act.  In the current draft, they survive and Character B dies.  But in my head, both of these are true stories.

Obviously, I have good reasons for choosing one of these to be canon.  But it makes me sad.  Because I love Character B.  I love the life they get to live in that other version of the story.  The hard choices they face, the friendships they forge.  They way they grow as a person.

So it’s got me thinking.  I can’t help but wonder about all the stories I never got to read from my favorite authors.  What alternate universes ended up on the cutting room floor?  I want to know if the author has a draft parked on some hard drive where those characters get their happily ever after.  I know there’s probably no universe where Leslie grew up to be mayor or head of the PTA, it wouldn’t have been much of a book without the gut punch.  But if there were, I’d like to read it.  It’s okay to live caught between universes.