Keith Schuyler's Blog: Between Choice and Consequence - An Author Blog by Keith Schuyler

My First Novel

Fall of the Resistance is the first novel I’ve published.

It’s not the first one I started writing.

That distinction probably says a lot about how I became a writer in the first place.

My first attempt at a novel was fantasy. Swords, magic, kingdoms, all the things you’d expect. But underneath the fantasy elements, I found myself writing about government overreach, persecution, and what happens when those in power decide certain people are dangerous simply because of who, or what, they are.

There were some very modern themes buried in there. I had just moved them into a fantasy world.

Progress was steady for a while. Then it slowed.

So, naturally, I decided to write a space opera.

FTL travel. Starships. Space Marines. Alien civilizations.

The whole bit.

And I loved it.

But something interesting happened as I got deeper into that story. Once again, the bigger ideas started creeping in. Politics. Genetics. Manipulation. The things people are willing to do to others when they believe their cause justifies it.

I really liked where the story was going, but I also realized I was getting too broad in a few places. The world kept getting bigger, the ideas kept multiplying, and eventually I stepped away from it.

Then came Fall of the Resistance.

This time, I was going to write a superhero novel.

At least, that was the plan.

I came up with characters. Powers. Even some cool superhero code names. If you’ve read the book, you know some of those survived, particularly on the Authority side.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of these characters as superheroes.

They were just people.

People who happened to be able to do extraordinary things.

And once I realized that, the story changed.

Because people make choices.

Sometimes they're good choices. Sometimes they're terrible ones. Sometimes we make the best decision we can with the information we have and discover later that we were completely wrong.

And choices have consequences.

They affect us. They affect the people we love. Sometimes they affect people we never intended to involve at all.

That idea became one of the driving forces behind Fall of the Resistance.

Mac, our central character, begins the story believing he needs to make decisions for everyone.

His team. His friends. His family.

And himself.

He can justify it, too.

He's protecting them.

At least, that's what he tells himself.

But what happens when protecting someone means taking away their ability to choose?

What if they would have chosen differently?

Can we trust the people we love to make their own choices when we believe those choices will put them in danger?

And maybe the hardest question of all:

Do we have the right to stop them?

Those questions became far more interesting to me than who could win a fight.

And they aren't explored through Mac alone.

Joy has choices to make.

So do Danni, Steven, Shepherd, Catherine, Joe, Mika, Duncan, and the others who become part of this story.

Sometimes they agree.

Sometimes they don't.

Sometimes someone makes a decision another person desperately wishes they hadn't.

That's where I discovered what Fall of the Resistance was really about.

So, is it a superhero novel?

I'm still not sure that's the right term.

There are certainly people with extraordinary abilities. Some are just beginning to understand what they can do. Others are discovering that the limits they thought they understood may not be limits at all.

There are fights. There is action. There are people who can do things no normal human being should be capable of doing.

But I don't think the powers are what make the story interesting.

The people are.

Looking back now, I can also see something I didn't recognize when I started that first fantasy novel.

All three stories were asking variations of the same questions.

What happens when someone has power over someone else?

Who gets to decide how that power should be used?

And who gets to choose?

Maybe I wasn't trying to write fantasy, space opera, or superheroes after all.

Maybe I was just trying to write about people.

It apparently took me three universes to figure that out.