When I began writing Lightbreakers, I hoped it would be much easier to write than my previous novel, The Ensemble, about a classical string quartet. I grew up playing cello but am not a professional musician, so I both relied on my own tactile experience and worked hard to make sure I got everything right about the career. In both ways, I was bound to real world details in a way I thought I wouldn’t have to be with Lightbreakers. Here, I would invent time travel; I would only be bound to imaginary, impossible technology.

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Well, I was wrong. In my many drafts, I had to learn so much—not only about science, but about loss, and about how to braid the two together. Below are the three most salient lessons from the depths of the speculative fiction trenches.

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If you find the beginning, you can find the ending.
For several drafts, I opened with many pages of the protagonists, Maya and Noah, at home before they leave for Marfa, Texas, where Noah has been called to participate in a secret scientific project. But with each successive draft, the inciting incident—Noah being invited to Marfa—was pulled earlier and earlier toward the start. I eventually understood that I had been writing static scenes of “characters in thought” just to underscore the way their thinking changes after the extremes they encounter in Marfa. But it turns out you can learn a lot by seeing how characters react to extreme situations without knowing anything about them beforehand, and in fact, that might be the best way to understand characters. In those moments, characters have good reason to accidentally reveal themselves, in a seamless way that a lot of exposition can’t get at.

I found I could expound on quantum consciousness all I wanted, but it all meant nothing to my greater project if I couldn’t find a way for these concepts to include real people.

And then, far into the book, I wrote a line: “In the beginning, there was happiness.” That one line unfolded a lot of the novel’s questions and themes for me. It’s in Maya’s close third POV, and it begs many questions: Is she lying? Is she saying that happiness was in the past? Is the same true for Noah? Where does Noah think his beginning is, and where does Maya think hers is? Is the book a journey towards both of them having the same beginning? That line—now the opening line of the novel—revealed that this time travel story would be about how to begin again.

Finding that beginning was also how I understood how to end the book. For a while I couldn’t figure out how to wrap up the emotionally intense, scientifically questionable plot. But when I returned to that first line, the way it indicates a sure grasp of time, I knew that in the end, my characters must release that sure-ness, and the idea that there is one single timeline and one kind of happiness toward which everything bends. Instead, they must embrace uncertainty. In the end there is happiness, too, and everything else.

You must build a machine.
Speaking of everything else, I had to reckon with science in a way I resisted for many, many drafts. I thought I could gesture towards a time travel mechanism without getting too specific. While I do think that most readers don’t need or want scientific precision in their literary speculative fiction, I failed to see that I was the one who had to be precise in my understanding if I was to give readers only what they needed to know. I didn’t want my readers to drown in the details, but unfortunately, I had to. I had to build a believable machine, and I had to know exactly how it worked, even if readers only saw the tip of the iceberg.

So, bit by bit, I read. I followed Wikipedia links. I bought used physics books. I read almost every book Carlo Rovelli wrote. I bought giant texts and read only a quarter of them. I Zoomed with physicists and neuroscientists who probably thought I was at least a little bit silly. I watched countless YouTube videos from PBS Space Time hosted by an Australian man whose voice I began to hear in my dreams. In the world’s most disorganized way—jotting down my changing ideas in an ever-growing Google doc—I developed a loose theory for how the science “worked” in my book. And then, in the very last draft, my editor asked me to clarify for her how the science worked.

I created a one-sheet (which was actually five pages) wherein I asked every question I could think of—what does the machine look like, how does it work, why does it work, when does it work, how many times can it work, who funded it, why did they fund it, what did they hope would happen, what actually happens, is it like Back to the Future?—and then I answered each one in plain language. This, of course, revealed holes in my machinery, and I had to do things like add in helmets and gasses and take away some vague ideas around meditation. It was a painful excavation process, but a completely necessary one, resulting in a map of answers that I am continually grateful to have.

That said, I hope no reader gets caught up in the details. The book isn’t really about the way the machine works. The book is about the people in the machine.

The machine must always lead back to the people.
It was easy in all of that to lose people. Being buried in dry science explainers is part of what makes those concepts—nonlocality, entanglement, black hole gravity—difficult to understand. They are abstract, painfully so, even when they are describing real world experiments. I found I could expound on quantum consciousness all I wanted, but it all meant nothing to my greater project if I couldn’t find a way for these concepts to include real people.

In the lonely, empty hole of grief, they could understand that there also existed love and possibility.

This mission felt even more difficult because the people in question were dealing with one of the most unfathomable losses: child loss. To that end, I went back to books. I read Yiyun Li’s gorgeous memoir about her first son’s death, Where Reasons End, as well as Rob Delaney’s matter-of-fact, heartbreaking memoir about his toddler son’s death, A Heart That Works. I also found a lot of help in Victor Lavalle’s novel The Changeling, a fantastical horror about an infant’s death. Now that I knew about the emotional landscape of this particular loss, as well as the science of my machine, my task was to make them inform each other.

I realized I’d sort of done this before. In college, I fulfilled a science requirement with a liberal arts class (which I recreated in Lightbreakers) where we mapped scientific ideas onto cultural movements through the centuries. For example, in the postmodern era, the more neuroscientists understood the brain—and what they didn’t understand about it—the less sure writers and artists were of one reality and objective truth. Similarly, I needed to mirror my characters’ experience of grief with scientific concepts, not just poetically, but materially.

Once I started thinking about scientific concepts in terms of people, the book became much more fluent. Entanglement—the idea that two particles are linked even at a vast distance—helped illustrate the characters’ desperate yearning to recreate the past. Carlo Rovelli’s writing about white holes—a theory that if a black hole exists, so does its opposite—helped me find a way to bring these characters towards reconciliation. In the lonely, empty hole of grief, they could understand that there also existed love and possibility.

There are so many kinds of time travel novels—those that branch off into alternate realities, those that loop and loop, those that deal with causality and the grandfather paradox—but the only one I had to learn how to write was mine. And finally, I did. Now, if I could only find a time travel machine to take me back to the beginning of this novel process, I’d finish this book much quicker.

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Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel is available from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.