I’ve written before about how mood affects reading, and how immersion influences writing. But what else shapes our stories? Emotions, the time of year, the room we write in. My unfinished novella was drafted in the early days of the Covid lockdown, and it carries all the tension and fear that hung in the air. How does my daily world find its way into my work?
I don’t write in a quiet New England hut or on a secluded island retreat. My days feature commutes, New York City, and suburban strip malls. Moments of grandeur tinged with decay. This isn’t neutral background noise, it conditions how I imagine fictional worlds. It shapes imagery, restlessness of characters, claustrophobia, the urge to escape, and a feeling that something is off beneath clean surfaces. No wonder I gravitate toward post-apocalyptic stories and settings.
The New Jersey suburbs carries a sense of the uncanny, an uneasiness buried beneath rows of similar houses and weedy lawns fed by gallons of clean water. The dreamlike monotony of sameness sits next to an awareness that all of it might be built on something rotten. Aging pipes, crumbling roads, dated schools, overstretched pensions, the illusion of safety and order. Is a post-apocalyptic world looming in the future, or is it already here, hidden beneath Dunkin’ Donuts plastic?
Commutes create liminal spaces. Ferries are a perfect example, suspended between home and the city, crossing water, physically and mentally in between. The subway is the opposite: nose to armpit with strangers, hot, held up by delays, engulfed by the steady decline of the system itself. Riders shutting down, wishing they were anywhere else in the world. These in-between spaces seep into my writing and create that drifting, epic quality. Characters become people who exist between worlds but never fully belong to any of them.
And then there is the streets of Manhattan. Everything all at once. Crowded streets, endless sirens, horns, the shouts of mentally ill. Sensory overload, followed by an instinct to retreat inward, to write inward, and search for quieter thoughts and clearer prose as a way to push back against the noise. I came up with the idea for my first story, The Inspector’s Legacy, while sitting on a bus outside the Port Authority in New York City, picturing the streets covered in ten feet of sea water.
So it’s no surprise I keep writing characters who bounce between solitude and entanglement. Characters who wrestle with the tension between isolation and connection, and never resolve it cleanly. Modern infrastructure becomes mythology. Ferries, highways, bridges, and subways turn into ancient runes. The built world becomes a relic. And in that relic I keep finding new stories.
