I Might Be Writing a Novel?

So uh...that's a thing that may be happening.

I've always felt more comfortable in poetry. I love fiction--reading it, that is--but I have no desire (normally) to write it. I've never had ideas I wanted to explore that felt like they couldn't be explored through poetry, so the compulsion to write fiction was never really there. I've tried my hand at it and it was fun, but it was never something that felt satisfying for me like poetry does.

And then I was talking to a friend of mine--oddly enough, about his experiences with recreational use of dissociative drugs, and how it made him feel he was living a whole other life in a matter of minutes--and all of a sudden ideas started going off.

So based on his experiences, the story will follow a character who inexplicably slips into other lives. In her own life she's only ever "gone" for a few minutes at a time, but she can experience anywhere from a few minutes to several years of another life. She will at least once or twice actually experience death and the nothingness that comes after.

My friend described the experiences as very strange, in that he felt like he was experiencing things as himself, but he knew he wasn't himself. He described having thoughts like, "This would be really scary if I was me, but I'm not me." And he said that the last time he tried this drug, while he was having these experiences, he had the thought of, "I'm here again. Why am I here again?"

I couldn't help but want to explore those ideas--of otherness, of dissociation from self, of death, of a sense of returning to a new experience, of the idea that we can't experience a lack of consciousness but what if we could? There's no way I can explore this in a poem.

So...I guess I'm writing a novel?

The thing is, with a lifetime of poetry writing, I don't really know HOW to write a novel. Right now, I'm just writing snippets of scenes as they come to me, things that may or may not end up in the final piece.

Here's one of those, if you're interested. Let me know your thoughts!