The Novel I Didn’t Mean to Write

This reflection charts the evolution of a novel from ironic detachment to moral intimacy, and considers how shifts in the world can shift the story we thought we were telling.

I didn’t set out to write about systemic bias or white complicity. I set out to write a clever satire: Groundhog Day meets Office Space. A man trapped in random time loops, mentored by Franz Kafka visiting from a parallel universe, working at a direct selling company. Quirky. Safe. Comfortable.

Then 2020 happened. George Floyd. The protests. The pandemic lockdowns.

I began reading about systems, institutions, and power, not as research for my novel, but because I needed to understand better what was happening around me. The Heritage, Rise of the Warrior Cop, Race Matters, and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? I downloaded audiobooks of Coates and Morrison and listened while biking empty streets. Later, I added Octavia Butler and Zora Neale Hurston while starting a pandemic garden. I read Native Son.

I’ve always loved history, but this time I was searching for meaning. Those books changed my perspective on social issues and exposed blind spots. And even though I hadn’t planned for my novel to engage with those ideas, I started to feel that it couldn’t ignore them.

So I tried to bring those themes into the book. I made the protagonist confront his apathy. I added cultural texture and referenced John Brown’s trial speech in the novel climax. But it read like three stories forced together. The hero emerged enlightened, but nothing had really cost him.

The turning point came when I read James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son.

Baldwin believed novels should present an honest and complex view of reality, not reduce people to symbols. He criticized Native Son, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and To Kill a Mockingbird for being “protest novels” that traded humanity for moral messaging.

I realized I had written one too.

I spent five years as a product manager in a direct selling company. Product managers have a unique vantage point. They talk to everyone—from executives to customers—and see how decisions are made, avoided, and where accountability quietly disappears.

Direct selling is the epitome of contradiction. It promises entrepreneurship and community while concentrating rewards at the top. It preaches family values while treating people like numbers on a spreadsheet—laying off employees while maintaining the landscaping budget. It invents inspiring origin stories, only to abandon them when research reveals a more profitable narrative. Executives preach hard work and a growth mindset in a world where management remains white, male, or related by blood. Although not formally required, religious affiliation—particularly membership in the LDS Church—often functions as a quiet prerequisite for leadership and advancement.

The people I worked with were not villains. Most were sincere, living the life they believed in. They were authentic and kind. But sincerity does not erase structure. What interested me most as an employee was the ordinary contradiction: how good people can participate in something broken and rationalize it because the alternative feels like betrayal.

But my earlier drafts didn’t really address this, not directly. And when it did, the characters were flat and caricatures… just as Baldwin warned. I had avoided the difficult truths, skirting the real questions. I was afraid to expose the darker corners of the story, to let it go where it needed to. That was the novel I had written, not deliberately but unavoidably.

I realized that the book didn’t need editing. It required a teardown.

I cut the Kafka character. Scrapped the time loop. Rebuilt Cody’s arc from scratch. I stopped trying to write a message and started trying to write a mirror.

The story was no longer about redemption. It was about recognition and complicity. It asked whether awareness is ever enough, what silence costs, and how comfort sustains the status quo.

And yet, for a story about complicity and silence, one absence speaks loudest.

Even though the novel deals with systemic bias and institutional racism, there is only one main nonwhite character. That absence isn’t accidental or careless. It reflects the world of direct selling—a space that speaks endlessly about opportunity and inclusion while remaining overwhelmingly white. To invent diversity where it didn’t exist would have been dishonest. The lack of representation isn’t the problem I created; it’s the problem the story reveals.

Of course, I knew this wouldn’t fly in traditional publishing. A debut white male author, writing about institutional racism and bias with a white male protagonist? A predominantly white cast? It looks like the same story we’ve seen a hundred times.

But it isn’t. I understand why it might seem that way, but the choice was intentional.

The story had to be told from inside the bubble, because that’s where complicity lives.

Cody’s the kind of man who knows the world is unfair but keeps hoping to solve only his piece of it. He sees the cracks, even feels them, but can’t yet admit he benefits from the same system he quietly despises. His story lives in that tension between awareness and avoidance.

He’s the lens, not the lesson. Through his perspective, the novel exposes the quiet hypocrisies of privilege, corporate culture, and self-delusion—not to redeem him, but to hold him accountable. Cody’s journey isn’t about becoming a savior; it’s about seeing what he’s been part of all along.

I’ve always been drawn to a simple but unsettling question: why do some people challenge the status quo, while others defend it—even when it harms them?

This novel doesn’t answer that question. It isn’t meant to.

But it asks it honestly, through a character who begins to see the cracks and must decide what he’s willing to lose to do what’s right.

I didn’t write this book to be forgiven, and neither did Cody. I wrote it because I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen—in my work, in the world, and in myself. I wanted to know what it would take for someone like him, and maybe someone like me, to stop looking away.

You might see yourself in him. Or maybe you’ll recognize someone you know. But if you’ve ever wondered why some people fight the system while others protect it, even at their own expense, I hope this story gives you space to sit with that question, and maybe carry it a little longer than before.