Order
16 July 2007
First it was this, then it was that.
The order in which you tell your story is crucial. And it is extraordinary how difficult it is to tell a story in order. It is so tempting to leap ahead to the exciting moment of drama, the brilliant location, the sharp one-liner.
At every dinner table, in every amicable conversation on the bus or train, you hear someone saying it: 'Oh no, I should have told you first that ...'
I suppose that's the self-editing instinct - or monitoring, as linguists call it, listening to yourself speaking, as you are speaking. And you can learn to do it well. If you speak a second language, often you hear the words inside your head the moment before you pronounce them. There is a kind of back and forth between what you want to say and what you end up saying.
But I don't believe you can really do that when you are writing creatively. I'm sure it would deaden my imagination.
So that means I have to take things on trust and unquestioningly follow the unexpected paths taken by my imaginary characters in my imaginary world. And it means I sometimes drift into dead ends.
Now and then I find myself writing a particularly rewarding scene and realise - with frustration - that I haven't set up the characters sufficiently or established their motivations. Or maybe the problem is I haven't planté les décors - built the scenery, established the geography of the imaginary landscape.
When I discover this kind of problem, my first thought is to try and make the scene carry more back story. I look for ways to make the current scene reveal information from the book's past.
And, in a majority of cases - maybe a huge majority of cases - I end up writing a new scene at an earlier point in the narrative. I go back and find a place where I show the reader what they need to know - 50, 100 or even 200 pages earlier.
I write timeslip stories, in which two plotlines from different moments in history run in parallel. In Labyrinth it was 'now' and the 13th century. In Sepulchre, it is 'now' and the 1890s. I am always wrestling with time and the order in which things happen.
Maybe this is one of the reasons why I love the image of the sepulchre.
The Sepulchre is a place of rest.
