Imagine a wall, and begin the story…

How do novels begin?

In the acknowledgments to Semiosis, I wrote: “I owe thanks to Gregory Frost, whose writing exercise about a special kind of wall led to this novel.”

That exercise took place in 1996 at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, which I attended. As one of the instructors, Greg assigned several exercises over his week of teaching, one of them involving a wall. As I recall, it went something like this:

“Imagine a wall that appears overnight between two groups about to go to war. They can see through it, they can communicate through it, but they can’t pass through it and attack each other. Begin that story.”

We only had to write the opening paragraphs, but some of us were inspired to continue. One wrote a bittersweet love story in a style we would now call steampunk, but back then we just called it imaginative. Another came up with a comic sword and sorcery novel with sex scenes and other digressions in the appendices.

(The photo shows us hard at work on a different exercise, a group project involving tropes.)

I eventually wrote a science fiction short story in which the wall is a human colony on a distant planet that establishes itself between two groves of plants at war against each other. That story was published in 1999 as “Adaptation” by the magazine LC-39, and later I expanded it into a novel, Semiosis.

Thanks again, Greg. Great oaks from little acorns grow.

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The trade paperback edition of Dual Memory comes out on April 16 and is available for pre-order from your favorite bookseller. Hardcover, ebook, and audiobook editions are also available.

The third book in the Semiosis trilogy, Usurpation, will be published in October this year, and you can pre-order it from your favorite bookseller, in hardcover and ebook.