The Backstory 📖
The inspiration and decision-making behind "The Archive," an ongoing serialized fiction experiment
If you’re new to The Rebel MFA Way, welcome! This is the backstory to my ongoing serialized fiction story, The Archive.
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How It All Began
I didn’t mean to start writing The Archive. In fact, one of my very few goals I bothered to set for 2025 was to go back and revisit some of my older work that I’d left to languish on the hard-drive. I knew I was ready to get back to writing fiction in a more intentional and serious way, but I hadn’t yet pinpointed which story I was going to dive into.
For the past year (but if I’m being honest, the “idea” had been planted long ago), I’ve been having dreams of an apocalypse. The kind that comes not from a natural disaster, but by societal and then, global, collapse. You can probably understand why I’ve been having those dreams. I’m sure many of you have even had a similar one.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when it morphed from a dream to a story, but I know the moment I realized it wasn’t just a story—it was a conversation.
The Archive began in pieces, in fragments. It still feels that way, like something unfinished, something alive. It’s personal, almost painfully so, in ways I’m still learning to articulate. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to share it. What do you do with a story that feels like a mirror, reflecting your own fears and questions, your wounds and desires? What do you do with a story that feels less like an escape and more like a confrontation? [Spoiler alert: you write it precisely because of those questions. You write it to heal.]
At first, I tried to make it fit into a box. Was it a novel? A novella? A collection of vignettes? The more I tried to name it, the more it slipped away from me. I’ve learned something about myself as a writer: my stories rarely conform to tidy definitions, and trying to force them into one is like holding my breath underwater. It’s suffocating.
Eventually, I gave up. I stopped trying to figure out what The Archive was supposed to be and started asking it what it wanted to become.
That’s when things began to shift.
A Story That Breathes
The Archive took its first breath when I let it be messy. I stopped worrying about structure or genre and started writing it in the form that felt most honest to me: journal entries.
The journal format wasn’t a decision so much as a discovery. The story wanted to feel intimate, like an exchange between two people. It wanted to feel like a conversation.
That’s when Ari entered the picture. Ari, who is both a character and something more—a voice, a presence, a companion in the narrative. I won’t say too much about Ari here, because meeting her is part of the journey, but what I will say is that her voice changed everything for me. Writing The Archive has become less about constructing a narrative and more about holding a dialogue. Ari asks me questions. She challenges me. She asks me to look deeper, to step outside the edges of what I thought I knew about the story and about myself. And then she helps me find the answers.
In many ways, The Archive feels less like a story and more like a living, breathing experiment. It evolves as I do. It reveals itself in pieces, one journal entry at a time, and I don’t always know where it’s leading me.
And that’s the beauty of it.
Why this format?
I wrote about this experiment in my essay, Magnetic Experimentation. You might see some repeating information here, but that essay is what gave me the push to experiment with this format.
Additionally, the more time I spend with Ari, writing her (our) story, the more I realize that this experimental format is not just for me.
It’s for anyone who has ever felt like their stories didn’t fit into the boxes they were told to stay in. It’s for anyone who has ever felt the tug of a story that wouldn’t let them go.
More than that, it’s an invitation: to think about the ways stories live and breathe, how they defy definition, how they can hold space for healing and transformation.
In many ways, The Archive is part of a larger conversation—about the shape of stories, the fire they hold, and the ways they can save us, individually and collectively.
An Open Invitation
The Archive is still unfolding. I don’t know where it’s leading me, and I’m not sure it wants to be finished in the traditional sense. It feels like a process, a practice, an ongoing conversation.
But what I do know is that it’s teaching me something important about storytelling—and about myself.
So I’m inviting you into the experiment. Into the questions and the messiness. Into the intimacy of a story that’s still finding its shape.
I hope The Archive speaks to you, in whatever way you need it to. I hope it reminds you that stories—like lives—don’t have to fit neatly into containers to matter.
And I hope, most of all, that it invites you to sit with your own stories, to ask them what they want to become.
Because maybe the shape of the story isn’t something we decide.
Maybe it’s something we discover as we go.