Ever since I was young I’ve been motivated to create a novel worthy of publication; this has been a persistent goal of mine throughout high school and college. At the start of college, I had a vague idea of the concept behind Eyes of Absence, though I had no idea what the plot would be like—I just had a sense of the feeling behind the book and the topics I wanted to cover. During this time, I studied song lyrics for both inspiration and for their poetic content. I found countless lyrics with deep and personal stories behind the songs and worked to understand how to break the lyrics down to find the hidden meanings.
I broke down as many song lyrics as possible to better appreciate them and I grew to admire their inherent poetic nature; this endeavor encouraged me to construct my own works that I felt would be fitting for the general themes I wanted to incorporate within my hopefully soon-to-be manuscript. I spent my free time freshman year: constantly building and ripping apart different poetry that would fit the character and the adversities presented within the story. I realized I’d never read a book that was closely tied in with poetry and lyrics to complement and enhance a storyline and help readers see deeper meanings behind the surface action occurring within a story. This process involved writing, rewriting, and reconstructing the same 11 pieces of poetry for over two years until they were saturated with as much meaning as their lines could ever hope to hold, and were later enhanced further through the story they were presented in. Perfecting the lyrical and poetic aspects of Eyes of Absence—and also inventing a new form of written cipher for the story—took me close to four years to complete.
While I was perfecting these 11 pieces of poetry, I worked to assimilate as much knowledge related to literature as possible because I knew whatever I wrote needed to be completely original. During this time I learned about gothic archetypes and was immediately enthralled by their use and appearance within so many modern stories, yet their “raw,” fascinating forms had never been entirely utilized; their symbols were simply silhouetted within literature, but the archetypes themselves were never presented in the clear. In presenting the raw gothic archetypes, such as the anima and shadow, I was confident I could create a story that would boast a new variety of memorable characters that readers would remember long after the story’s end.
As I learned about the many gothic archetypes, I experienced and witnessed the darker sides of life, and these experiences served as inspiration to catalyze the development of Eyes of Absence. Despite being fiction, Eyes of Absence represents the genuine horrors of life and the complexities of self in an unapologetically true way.
Bryce Christopher's Novels 