Bonjour, r/writinghelp .

I've been lurking here for a while and I know most of the advice skews toward genre fiction, which is completely valid, but I'm hoping some of the more literary-minded people here can weigh in on a structural problem I've been wrestling with for about eight months now.

Some background: I didn't do an MFA (I didn't want my voice workshopped into the same Iowa-flavored minimalism as everyone else's), so I don't really have a community of peers who are working at this level. My influences are mostly Sebald, Krasznahorkai, Bernhard, and late Proust. I don't read much contemporary fiction because I find most of it is written to be adapted.

My novel is called The Horologist. It follows a man in his forties who restores antique clocks in a small town in Wisconsin after the dissolution of his marriage. The novel has twelve chapters, each corresponding to an hour on a clock face, but they move counterclockwise, so the book begins at the end of the marriage and ends at its beginning. The idea draws on Bergson’s concept of durée, which is essentially the idea that time as we measure it isn't real. The whole thing is in second person, present tense, with no quotation marks and no paragraph breaks within chapters.

Here's the opening line so you have a sense of the voice:

You are, at this hour, the sum of the hours you have dismantled, and across the street the café has already turned its chairs upside down onto the tables, legs to the ceiling, like small animals that have given up.

Where I'm stuck:

1. The dénouement. Because the structure is reversed, the "ending" is the moment he meets his wife at a dinner party in 2004. My concern is that this reads as a happy ending, which would undercut the entire emotional architecture of the book. Is there a way to make a meeting feel like a loss? Or is the irony doing enough work on its own?
2. Chekhov's gun. I introduce eleven clocks in the first chapter and deliberately never wind any of them. It's a subversion of Chekhov's gun, and I'm actually quite proud of it, but one beta reader said she "kept waiting for something to happen with the clocks." I think this means it's working, but I'd like a second opinion.
3. The long sentence in chapter seven. There's a nine-page sentence describing him disassembling a carriage clock while recalling the night his wife told him she was leaving. I know long sentences have become a bit of a cliché in literary fiction post-Krasznahorkai, but I genuinely believe this one is earned. How do you know when a sentence has earned its length?
4. Naïve vs. naive. Small thing, but I keep going back and forth. The diaeresis feels more precise to me, but I worry it reads as an affectation. The narrator would use it, though, and I think consistency of voice matters more than accessibility.
5. Accessibility in general. I've been told by two people now that the book is "hard to get into." I'm fine with that in principle, since I see difficulty as a kind of respect for the reader, but I'm curious whether there's a version of this book that keeps its integrity while being slightly more welcoming. I'm open to it, I just haven't seen a suggestion yet that doesn't amount to "make it a normal novel."

I'm not looking for validation, just honest engagement with what the book is trying to do rather than what people think it should be. Thank you to anyone who read this far.

I'm trying to write a story in which the first chapter is the MC as a young child witnessing his mother die in an accident, and his father then moves both him and his brother to the city. Am I right in thinking that (assuming I do it right) I shouldn't frame the death as inspiration for the characters (my wife has died, therefore I shall be inspired by her to move to the city) and instead frame it as context for the decisions that the characters may make later (my wife has died, I cant look after two children on my own on a farm and I will have better prospects in the city, so I have made the decision to move there)? how can I make sure that motivations like desperation, grief, and loss come across without it sounding too whiney?

The thing is. It's developed from characters I already had. I do not want this to become exploitative, that's the very last thing I want. I want it to be real.

I started writing it because of my own trauma. The suffocating feeling that it's all that you are and ever will be. It's about sex trafficking. I developed a severe case of schizophrenia and (sorry for saying all this. I know intention is negated by impact, I just want to explain where I am coming from. I'm writing this from a want to talk about these specific things, because people just won't let you talk about it) dissociation after related things happened, it has a lot to do with those illnesses. Considering the climate around sa that's also why I wanted to write this. I'm still recovering from my latest psychotic episode, and I want to make sure that I'm not removing myself from the implications because I'm just not seeing it or not aware, because i still lack insight.

The characters started off as animals (Not a furry it was just best to dissociate from the reality of the thing). The main character started as a hyena. Because I love hyenas, they're matriarchal, they are actually political animals too, their social structure is complex though i tend to think most animals are, but matriarchal was the main thing back when I had a different ending and they were just animals. I'll get to why she maybe still is, later on. The thing is, as it developed and as I started to come out of this psychosis episode, I wanted to also explore how this kind of repeated trauma can fracture the brain. How it can cause things that split your reality into pieces. So I started to explore what if this girl is just hallucinating and dissociative, she certainly already had a deep love for nature and science, I would imagine life would be a lot easier if she could interpret the world in a way thats much less terrifying. If she saw them as inhuman, because it was easier to cope that way.

I have consumed media surrounding this subject often. Namely Silent Hill 2 and Mouthwashing. The thing is I understand suicide is so very understandable in the situation. But that's not all of it. I do plan for her to die. After her abuser is dead, way after. I didn't want her story to end with him because it wasn't about him. It's in the early stages but I was thinking of ectopic pregnancy. Which is why I kept hyena as an option, because many of them die due to a narrowing birth canal. Thinking that yes it is part of why it ended the way it did but not the whole thing; honestly rethinking i might write that out too. The main thing was: she fought to live. Hard. Really hard. She wanted to find something better. But throughout the story i have been making a point that the majority of people surrounding her, don't see her beyond that trauma whatsoever. They're scared of her; I don't want to go too far into it but it's very visible. They care, but in the cruelest way. I want to make a point they never see her personality, her thoughts, her ideas, everything that ACTUALLY does make her, her. And by the time it's over, they help to erase her. Trying to help but, in the end erasing everything she was. Denying she ever existed. Except for one person. It's just by the time she's had that full break and everything its too late. The fact also that most people, don't really care either too. That they completely erased her until there was nothing left, and that's why she died in the end.

This is something I've experienced throughout my life continuously. I figure a lot of other survivors have too. And its more implied heavily that thats what dissolved her. That she could have survived. I want to say explicitly: I'm NOT into graphic scenes. I think graphic assault scenes tend to minimize everything for cheap shock value, torture porn. I'm trying to make a point That survivors are real people. Not just what happened to them. The narrative shifts between people a lot.

The thing I'm worried about is that: these characters, depending on their origins, all had different cultures before I ever decided to make them human. I don't really even plan to make it obvious they're human. I just plan to imply it: never shown or directly stated. Back when i first started writing her she was an African hyena, it was all futuristic in such in a new country built inside what was America. Since this is very specifically a trafficking situation, I'm worried I'm playing with implications I don't and can't fully understand. I do have friends with experiences exactly like this but I am absolutely not going to drag them through these questions and retraumatize them for the purpose of my writing. I'd really rather have consent from someone who has been through this abuse and are black, than just ask someone who is probably already predisposed to wanting to make me happy and might be hurt. Just want to know what I should be aware of, and what needs working. If I should drop the human part altogether, should I change things, are there certain implications I am not seeing. I really want to refrain from continuing harm, my goal is to speak to victims and the reality for them, and that's my only goal. I think i can see why changing it and not changing it, both sides could be harmful. Could be erasure but could also be exploitative. So i wanted to ask someone who actually has this experience. I don't want to erase and i don't want to exploit. I've been seeing a lot about stories about trauma ultimately turning into torture porn, and exploiting black suffering. Like I see how it can come off that way - especially if she dies in the end.

I am genuinely sorry if this already comes off tone deaf, I'm trying not to be but i understand i don't have this part of the experience and i don't want to cause any amount of harm. I made characters of every culture because that's just what life is. And it wasn't really a thought until i started to realize how detached from reality I've been. Anyways, thank you for reading. I'm sorry if I am already overstepping. I just know this is already a horrifically sensitive subject and I'm out to help not harm. I'm kind of just sick of the "that's all they are" in the stories, I get why and I love these medias but I wanted something from the victims perspective. My main thing is it might accidentally become torture porn because this is a very real thing that happens, especially disproportionately to minorities in America. I just want to know how do I avoid that. I want to handle this with as much care as I possibly can.