When I was writing The Wanderer series, I was interested in exploring Lucinda’s coming-of-age.

From the beginning, I wanted to make her a strong female character but if I made her too strong, she wouldn’t have much of an arc. “She starts off strong and stays strong” isn’t all that interesting to follow.

But because she is young at the beginning of the series – around eighteen or twenty years old – I felt it would work for her to be strong but naive, and that part of her arc would be about letting go of illusions about how the world works.

In the end, after she has lost almost everything, she begins again with a clearer understanding of the world she lives in and who she herself is in that world.

So it was interesting to me to realize that I was doing the same thing in my current work-in-progress. You can follow along with that story in the Naked Writing blog posts.

Something I deeply value is being able to see the world as it is and not try to explain or spackle over it.

But the narrator in the new novel (who doesn’t have a name yet) is middle-aged and hardly naive, so I had to do something different. In this case, I decided to work a little bit backwards: she wakes up at the beginning (so to speak) and begins to see the world as it is – seeing the fantastical elements that were hidden from her before.

So her journey is about discovering why she can now see the world as it is, and then learning how to act on that knowledge.

Although they are entirely different story worlds – the current work is set in contemporary Los Angeles – the question of what happens after you see the world as it is was left unexplored in The Wanderer series. That’s the endpoint.

In the new work, it’s the starting point.

I suppose that’s what makes this work endlessly fascinating; there is always another angle on the theme that I’m interested in exploring.

Jennifer Lawler has been a writer-editor for more than twenty-five years and has published more than forty novels and nonfiction books. She is the founder of the online education company Club Ed LLC.