Alma Alexander

(…yes, I’m in the middle of it. Why do you ask?)

Here’s the thing. First drafts are supposed to be awful. HTat’s what they are FOR. You simply give yourself the permission necessary to WRITE BADLY if you have to, for the purpose of getting the bones of the story down on the page. There will be time for fixups later. So you do this thing, and the story comes out, and there it is, staring at you. And yea, verily, in your mind’s eye it was ever beautiful – and it’s still marginally lovely – but now that it is outside of you it begins to be glimpsed in its true shape. And there. Are. Imperfections.

Let’s see. THIS can be tweaked. THAT can be fixed. THIS OTHER THING needs to go, really. SOMETHING ELSE needs to be written, and added in, to add clarity.

You know the drill.

For most of us, the architecture of the town of FirstDraft is familiar, and I have no real doubt that we’d probably recognise one another’s FirstDraftTtowns fairly easily. But a strange thing happens when each individual writer leaves the city limits, en route for the wilds of SecondDraftia. It’s a sort of dimension portal, and it sends everybody to a different place, unique to themselves, full or peculiar traps and difficulties that are never quite found in the same shape or form in any other writer’s world. To paraphrase a well-known bon mot, all First Drafts are kind of rotten in a similar way. Every Second Draft has its own unique problems.

Different writers react to the art and the craft (and it IS both) of rewriting in their own peculiar ways. Some tell me that they enjoy the act of rewriting and editing far more than they enjoy the actual storytelling – because for them the telling of the story is the hard part, and now that they have that, in however awful a shape, for them the real fun begins, and that is actually chiselling this raw and barely recognisable slab of marble into a real Michelangelo’s David, chipping away one tiny flake of marble at a time until it is all perfect and polished. Others, – and oh dear GOD I fall into this category – want to tear their hair out at the roots at this point. Because the story, you see, it is TOLD, and yes we who feel this way can SEE that it isn’t without flaw (NOTHING ever is) but in some senses it IS perfect, it has a shape and a form and a balance inside our heads, an changing ANYTHING tends to have consequences everywhere, and you are faced with continuity issues from hell itself, and AAAARGH.

It’s the difference in tone – having a character say something as simple as “I’m sorry” in a different tone of voice, an inflexion that might change it from an empty phrase of cold indifference (I’M SORRY but I couldn’t care less really) to a genuine and sincere sympathy (I’M SORRY that your goldfish died. I REALLY am.) – well – it changes that character. And it changes the way other people respond to that character. And THAT changes other conversations. And that changes what people might have known, and when they might have known it. And THAT changes the flow of the story. AND that…

Well, you get the idea. Before too long, you pull out one thread and you realise that you are suddenly hip deep in the Big Muddy and it’s all falling apart around you and you’re scrambling to hold together in a coherent whole something that looked perfectly solid just a moment before. It’s like the cement holding the story together suddenly turns to jello on you and the edifice starts tottering precariously and oops, there goes a piece you really didn’t want to lose but argh it doesn’t fit any more, and dammit, there’s all those words on the cutting room floor and wasn’t tehre something important there that you absolutely need to salvage – or rephrase – or do something constructive with…

 

Pardon the mess.

I need to go back to my own reconstruction now. There is a glaring piece of continuity error that I need to address right now.

And you know what the worst of it is? It’s that if you’re good enough you’ll end up with a seamless piece of prose that doesn’t look like it’s been tinkered with, that looks like it’s always been perfect, that it was born this way. A reader who never saw the original will NEVER KNOW. And they shouldn’t, that’s part of the point, but while you’re in the throes of working as hard as you know how,trying your damndest to change your beloved tale from passable to good or maybe even from good to great, you know that THIS part of your job is always going to be done alone and in the dark and without reward. It’s just a hard slog. Yes, knowing that there is something worthwhile at the end of it all helps but in the meantime you’re working on your own in the dark with a flashlight held between your teeth and with the right tools ALWAYS just out of reach in the shadows.

I am hoping that this thing I am working on now is going to fledge very soon, and that it is going to be an eagle, soaring high and powerful up there in the open skies. I’ve got a good story here, I know that much. I am trying very hard to make it better, and it can always be better, I know that. But still – this is one of those things that I will be glad to HAVE DONE and that I am far from happy to BE DOING. With luck those of you who might read it one day will never know what I changed, how I tweaked, what I had to lose and what it was necessary to graft on. And please, for the the sake of everybody involved… if you should happen to see a little dust on the floor, or a stray broken bit of a past imperfection littering the floor at the feet of the completed story statue, be merciful, and forgive. And kick it discreetly someplace out of sight.

Chisel in hand. Back into the fray. See you on the other side.

My own most recent experience, with a just-finished novel only now beginning to make its rounds to beta readers and agent and such, illustrates  an interesting point.

Readers like rogues.

Think about a more famous situation than my own story, right now. Think Star Wars. (No, the ORIGINAL Star Wars, not the latter three abominations.) They had their protagonist all nicely set up – there he was, a pent-up wannabe hero-boy trapped on a nowhere-world just waiting for a chance to show his mettle in a situation where it matters. And lo, he is given the chance – off Luke Skywalker goes, to seek his glory and to get his girl.

But oh. Wait. Enter Han Solo, stage left. And people kind of grin and sit up and raise their eyebrows, and we’re off. In that deathless scene where they rescue the Princess from the prison cell even she is instantly and immediately sarcastic to Luke who kind of stutters and stammers and yanks off his stolen startrooper’s helmet and kind of babbles about being there to rescue her. Yes, Solo stammers and babbles too – but he ends HIS stint at it by simply blowing up the com link. Enough talking. Let’s DO.

Off goes Luke, seeking Jedi-ness, seeking wisdom, seeking Yoda, doing yoga on a steamy jungle world and getting metaphysical revelations.Solo?… goes off on adventures. The adventures get him into trouble. And yet even when Leia and Luke and the cavalry come to rescue him from Jabba’s Han Solo is still the man of the hour and everyone else is just dancing to his tune.

He’s a rogue. Just keeping this genre – so’s Captain Mal in Firefly. So’s Captain Kirk, really (when was the last time he played by the rules?) Inigo Montoya. Captain Jack from Torchwood, anyone? For that matte, Doctor Who? Paul Atreides?

As the saying goes, nice guys finish last. They seem to be difficult to write believable stories about, stories which show them in the best possible light without putting the reader to sleep. It seems we aren’t – at least when it comes to fiction – interested in reading hagiographies; we like a little bit of spice to our protagonist, to know that our lead character is capable of doing something underhand if it needs to be done while staying  BASICALLY honourable and upright.Don’t get me wrong, there ARE villains, and there are places for villains, and we loathe a properly moulded villain as we should – and there are signs and portents telling us who the truly BAD people are in any given tale so that we can respond to them in proper vise. But there are people for whom we root, instinctively, passionately, BECAUSE they  have a Past, or have a Secret, or have a Flaw. The Rogue. The Bad Boy. The one that comes in dressed in black leathers riding a Harley and waits, silently, while the heroine looks from him to the wet-blanket hero who’s standing there wearing a white had and whining about how he deserves her undying devotion and then turns her back on the white-hat and runs, not walks, to the promise of danger and excitement and adventure and not-quite-safety that the guy on the black bike represents.

Shifting into a slightly different genre… It’s no accident that Elizabeth Bennett falls for Darcy. It’s no accident that Jane Eyre runs to Rochester. It’s far from an accident that Cathy can’t let go of Heathcliff. It’s no accident that in so many romance novels the hero is less than holier-than-thou – at the very least until he meets and is tamed by our heroine’s devotion and goodness – the surfeit of goodness that she carries, because it has to suffice for BOTH of them during the happily ever after which will ensue after the consummation of the romance. But dammit, that’s what keeps it INTERESTING – which romantic heroine worth her salt wants to spend the rest of her days with someone who is ALREADY all nice and reformed? What’s the challenge in that?

When I was creating my own “bad boy” character, I was writing about a young man in his late teens who has been damaged by a number of things that happened during his formative years. He was uprooted from his original home and his family, he is failing at something that the rest of his family consistently succeeds at, he is racked with guilt over his perceived role in his older sister’s death, and when he takes matters into his own hands and tries to put things right everything goes spectacularly wrong for him… and yet so far every beta reader who has picked up this story has a consistent favourite character, and it’s this guy. He’s a rogue, you see, and rogues (especially those whose intentions are basically okay-to-good) attract us all because there is some part of us all that thinks that we, as readers or viewers of a story told in a book or seen on a screen, have the actual power to wade in and rescue these characters from themselves somehow. And failing that, their adventures, even if filled with heroic and catastrophic failures, are that much more EPIC, more fascinating, than the good boy’s stepping up all bright eyed and bushy tailed to receive his little gold star from his teacher for a well-done piece of homework.

In a well-told story, characters change. With a protagonist who is poisonously good to begin with, that change cannot go anywhere at all that is remotely in the right direction – that kind of protag cannot get GOODER than he (or she) already is. With a rogue whose heart is in the right place… well, there is always the possibility that the call of the Dark Side will prove too strong, of course, but the far more tantalizing possibility is that things will go the other way, and we root for that… and in the meantime, we enjoy the hell out of the journey. With a rogue possessed of charm and wit and the occasional leavening stab of bright-eyed malice, life is never dull.

There is a whiff of something that smells like Redemption, and we are suckers for Redemption. Even the most cynical of us lapse now and then and believe in a smidgin of it. It’s hardwired into us. The basic underlying plot of any tale is the road to redemption, someone’s redemption. It makes us feel better to see it, to sense it, to be a part of it. Rogues have more fun – always assuming, of course, that they won’t slide all the way into the pure evil on the far side.

Which book are you reading RIGHT NOW? Does it have a rogue in it?…

When I was young, we travelled on European trains.

They were old-world trains. They had compartments (think Hogwarts train). You wandered down a corridor, peering into the glassed-in compartments, seeking space; sometimes the grey utilitarian institutional pleated curtains were drawn, blocking your eye, and those compartments you passed quietly by; other times you’d catch the eye of some solitary occupant, and there would be a lift of an eyebrow, a minute nod, and you would push aside the door (they were more often than not often wooden, too, back then – no squealing metal in here, just the velvet rush of wood on wood in its groove) and lift your small square suitcase – no wheels! – up onto the rack, and sit down. You might strike up a conversation with the stranger. You might not, simply sitting there staring out of the grimy windows at the passing scenery, your chin cupped in your hand. There’s a photo of me somewhere, doing just that, a child with her elbow on the narrow windowsill, her eyes distant and unfocused, seeing who knows what. The seats were upholstered couches – at least in the classes that we travelled in – with ramrod stiff backs – no such namby pambyness as reclining seats here. You sat up, with your back straight, like a gentleman or a lady should.

People would take packed lunches – boxes or baskets of carefully wrapped cold chicken, or salami, or sandwiches, and sometimes a piece of apple cake or an actual apple for dessert. Good wholesome food, cooked at home by mothers and grandmothers, lovingly packed, gluttonously consumed when you got hungry. There would be a conductor with a peaked hat and sometimes a salt-and-pepper moustache and round glasses – or was there only one of those, and he went around all the European trains, a super-conductor (heh) who existed only in hyper-relativity space, like Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. He’d come in with a punch attached to his belt with a silver chain, and punch a hole in your ticket, and tip his cap to you, and walk out again. And you would go back to the scenery, or perhaps playing a game of cards on the back of a suitcase fetched down from the rack for this purpose, or a book.

And night would fall outside, like a curtain, and things would fade away into the darkness. You’d see just lights passing by, like fireflies, enigmatic human habitations flickering like distant suns in some unknown galaxy, just as mysterious and far away as those stars in the heavens. Sometimes the moon would be full, and there would be a spill of old-gold or bone-white light on the landscape, casting eerie shadows. And then you’d pull into tiny little stations you often never even knew the name of – but they were home, for somebody, because you could see people getting off the train, or hugging those left behind on the platform as they climbed in. And then there would be a shout – that bespectacled conductor, hanging off the steps of one of the carriages – and the train would begin to move again, slowly, jerkily, leaving the flickering lights of the tiny station and the lives it harboured behind in the night. (There was a perfectly wonderful story about an Eastern European football team who was travelling by train into the heart of Europe for a match, and they had delegated one of their number to keep an eye on what stations they were stopping at – but every time the train stopped the poor sap would look out the window and announce they were stopped at Station Ausgang (which, of course, means “Exit” in German) until someone else woke up to the unlikely fact that they had just passed their sixth Ausgang in a row and while it might be conceivable that there might be several places with the same name it was probably not going to be six places strung out one after another on the same railway line… by which stage, of course, they were way past their intended destination, and the game they were supposed to be on their way to play had receded into history…)

If we travelled by night, we took a sleeping car. The private compartments would have attendants who would come by and politely turn the couches into sleeping bunks; somebody would always have to climb the velvet rope ladder and tuck themselves into the top bunk, just underneath the ceiling, where you couldn’t sit up without braining yourself – but I tended to be tucked into the lower bunk, with my ear against the soft lullaby of the wheels on the track, something that lulled me to sleep on many a night. Quiet, melodic, rhythmical, occasionally skipping a beat as the train passed a place where rail lines met, or a siding turned off, or a switch waited to let us through – ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-da-ta-da-ta-da-tat-tat-DAM, ta-da-ta-dam… And I slept, and I dreamed, and stories came crowding like night butterflies with midnight-black wings spangled with stars.

Those days, I suspect, are long gone, even in Europe, in these modern times. Trains today look more like the Amtrak trains that crisscross America – and THEY look rather more like an airliner cabin than the trains that rumbled through my childhood, and what’s more are proud of that. Brochures show lines of seats in an open compartment, just like in an airplane. People don’t really do the kind of thing that they used to – it’s kind of difficult, and not a little embarrassing, to be seen unpacking a lunch of cold chicken and apple pie out there in the open where anyone might look and judge and scorn. You go to the buffet car instead and you buy coffee in cardboard cups too hot to hold, and those tiny single-serving pizzaz which you KNOW are bad for you for a half-dozen good reasons, or sandwiches industrially wrapped in cling-wrap (turkey and mayo, chicken and pesto, roast beef… oh, sorry, we’re out of roast beef…), or large chewy chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies which leave you still hungry moments after you’ve finished crumbling them with your sticky fingers. People are more likely to sit there with earbuds in their ears and nodding to music only they can hear – taking isolation and insulation where they can, in the absence of the privacy of those compartments – or, worse, talking loudly on the ubiquitous cellphones that everyone seems to be carting around these days. Cranky babies or toddlers in the train car? Too bad, the parents are going the same place you are, you’re all going to be sharing this car for the next five or six hours, and the kid probably won’t be quiet for more than thirty minutes of that as (s)he falls into an exhausted nap to replenish their energies for the next bout of cranky they’re about to generously share with you. Sleeping cars are available, but all too often priced out of anyone sane’s budget – so you sleep sitting up, knees cramped against the back of the seat in front of you just like in the worst airplanes of your nightmares. Sleep, if you can; if there are no people bickering in the seat behind you, or there is nobody who’s imbibed a little too much and has lost his off-switch and doesn’t even realise how loud and obnoxious they’re being, or somebody who’s started to hum annoyingly with whatever’s playing on his iPod without even realising that they’re doing it.

But outside the land still passes by, in sunlight or under the moon, with rain leaving streaks of water on the windows or with nothing left to look at but the reflection against the outside darkness of the pallid overhead lights in the cabin or (if they’ve dimmed those) the occasional glitter of someone’s overhead reading light somewhere behind you.

When I travelled to Japan a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the Shinkansen, the Bullet Train, a long sinuous double-headed white snake of a thing, pointed at both ends, whooshing along at hundreds of miles an hour. You barely have time to look at anything out of the window, there – you glimpse something and whoosh, you’re past, and its way over there behind you. I was in Tokyo as a typhoon came roaring down the throat of the city, and the trains were stilled until the storm passed, but there were shots of them on the news, hunkered down and gleaming wet in their berths in the rain looking like a nest of sleeping dragons; once they were released again and we went to board ours, it was an entire cultural experience. They ran like clockwork – they remained in any given station a precise number of seconds, and the doors would open at a predetermined moment, and close after the requisite number of seconds had ticked by, and it was your responsibility to be on or off that train in that period of time. The trains did not wait for the tardy. There was a confectionery seller in the shape of a young Japanese woman in a frilly apron and kitten-heeled shoes and her glossy black hair tied back in a huge Minnie Mouse ribbon – she would push her cart into the train car, bow politely to the passengers at large, serve those who indicated that they wanted something, and then, on the way out, would turn and bow respectfully to the oblivious backs of the seats facing away from her, a bow which no passenger would notice or see unless they were specifically looking (as I had been) before pushing her cart into the the next train car to repeat the procedure. The signs by the doors, where we waited to disembark, at the ready, knowing the short stops in the stations, were a precious mess of entertaining translations – my favourite was the English version of the sign underneath the emergency brake – “If you pull this you will be inquired by the crew”.

Sometimes I miss trains. I left an uncounted number of sunglasses on European trains, I left books behind (by accident or design) in my wake. I picked up the debris of meals, both homemade and purchased on board. I dreamed many a dream, asleep in my lower berth listening to the train sing to me.

I learned of land, and of sky, and of light, and of motion, and of people.

Stories. Stories, everywhere. Lost, in a train of thought.

Oh, please. It’s October. There’s “gravestones” in every suburban garden. The spiderweb/ghoul/pumpkin/candy/spookycreakynoises day is almost upon us, and the dead are about to rub their eyes and wonder if it’s time to wake up, after all.

Graves are a natural, given the time of year.

We have a cemetery not too far from us – some ten miles or so down the road. It’s one of the most obnoxiously CHEERFUL cemeteries I’ve ever seen – in spring, its main gate is awash in nodding daffodils and scarlet tulips and the cherry trees within the cemetery itself burst into bright extravagant bloom, and when October rolls around the trees around the perimeter and along the alleys within the cemetery itself turn all sorts of wonderful colours from burnished lemon yellow through bright orange bronze into deep russet reds. It might sound rather morbid to say so, but it’s a joy to take a walk in this area in the fall, actually, especially on one of those crackling cool autumnal sunshine days when the sky is an unbelievable blue and all the hues of fall pop against it just crying out to be photographed. I”ve done just that, many times. The place is nothing if not photogenic.

It also contains plenty of fascinating stuff in and amongst the graves themselves. There are a whole bunch of gravestones in there which are no more than a plaque – often moss-overgrown, when it comes to the older ones – set into the sward with simply the word “Mother” incised into it. Now, that’s all very well, but dear God in Heaven, *was that all that she was*? Who was this mysterious “mother” sleeping in the ground here? Might she also have been someone’s daughter, sweetheart, lover, wife? When was she born? When did she die? Was she a doting grandmother when she passed from the mortal sphere, or was she a new mother with babes in swaddling clothes left behind her in the world? There’s a STORY here, an untold one, and it bugs the storyteller in me something terrible. Inquiring minds want to know, as it were, first and foremost my own. Of course, given that there are no details whatsoever might also imply that I am free to make up my own version of this poor woman’s life. That could work…

There are other stones.

Poignant ones, which you pass by and you read the inscriptions and you find yourself tearing up. You pass by the stone marker, all askew now, and you take a closer look at the dates of birth and death… and you realise that the human life which this stone commemorates lasted less than a year, that the small body lying underneath this green grass and the soft autumn leaves was a babe in arms, that someone somewhere loved this baby enough to raise her this memorial. You wander pass a stone which gives only a name, a couple of dates, and a single incised line of two words: “Only sleeping”. There’s a stone – for a woman who was born in the late 1800s and died in 1934 – which has a balloon attached to it, which says “happy birthday” (someone’s optimistic. or someone loved this woman very very very much).

Then you get the amusing ones. There’s a stone in our cemetery which says that he who lies underneath it rejoiced in the name of “M__ Person” (I’ll redact the names. They may be dead but Halloween’s coming. I don’t want them after me) – as in, what else would be lying here? A beloved horse?… Then there’s a family monument, all marble and fake stone torches alongside the great slab, which bears a family name which begins with “Fuss” (no kidding). There’s a stone which trumpets that underneath it lies a “Distinguished Author, Scholar, and Renaissance Man of the 20th Century” – followed by a three-line-long quote by the great man himself which, um, doesn’t really add much to the equation – it says that man alone of all creatures can determine the fate of his species. The fact that it kind of leads inexorably to a graveside is, um, ironic. There’s a REALLY disconcerting one where a small cherub standing by the graveside blowing a horn is, um, holding the horn up in the required position but is minus a head bearing a mouth with which to produce a sound on said horn. Headless cherubim blowing the Last Post are kind of… interesting…. as and of themselves.

The thing is, for a certain small subset of people a graveyard is where a story ENDS. For those of us who come after, wandering the paths in golden fall sunshine and glancing at the graves, it’s where stories BEGIN. There are so many stories here. So many. Grave matters, to be explored, extrapolated, discussed, woven into tales.

Really old European cemeteries are even more interesting – the kind where the stones themselves have been worn away by time until all you can say with certainty that the buried one died sometime in the 1600s, for instance. And then there are other stories, like Greyfriars Bobby, for instance. I still think that it was churlish to refuse to bury the faithful dog with his master on the grounds that he was an unbaptised cur. They could have sprinlked holy water on the mutt and muttered something baptismal, if that was what it took. PLease don’t stand there and tell me that dogs have no souls and don’t go to heaven – because if that’s true then I don’t want to go there either. So there. All the holy rollers can have it all to themselves, without the joy of a wagging tail or a prodigious purr to leaven the long days of Eternity. There’s only so much angelic singing that you can do before you’ll probably wish you were dead all over again.

I suppose this particular meandering discourse might fall under the general heading of “where do you get your ideas”. Sometimes, other people bury them for you, and you can read just enough of a hint on a listing ancient grave marker they left behind to finish the story in your own inimitable way.

Happy Halloween. Don’t let the ghouls get you.

There came a day when I ended the new novel – the story arc had done its job, started out and then ramped up the tension and then came to a climax and then began to wind down and then came to an end. All the elements were there. The bones, the skeleton, of a book.

A week after that day, I actually FINISHED the book.

There IS a difference, here.

An imperfect but somewhat helpful analogy would be the baking of a cake. You start out with the ingredients – the flour, the eggs, the butter, the sugar, chocolate, maybe a bit of brandy or candied fruit, whatever it takes – and they are all disparate elements at this point, existing in their own elemental form, the little pile of flour over here, the little pile of sugar over there, the eggs (often separated into the whites and the yolks, for these have different roles in cake-making…) neatly set side someplace else. None of it seems like it particularly wants to go with anything else, and certainly not with EVERYTHING else – but there is something that ties it all together, the overarching vision, the “arc” of the storyline if you will, the recipe in which all these “plot” elements appear and must find a role to play. So you get to work, and you sift the flour, and you melt the butter, and you combine the ingredients in certain ways, and you stir it all together and finally you arrive at a stage where you have “ended” the preparation of the cake – all the ingredients are inside, in proper proportions and properly mixed together – but it should be painfully obvious that there is something else that is still needed. An extra step.

So you put the cake into an oven. And then you close the oven door, and you leave it for a little while for the magic to happen.

In half an hour or an hour, you open up the oven and take out the cake pan. The contents has transformed itself into something that is unrecognisable from the gloopy mess you put into the oven just  a short while ago. Depending on your recipe you have something that’s crusty, or moist, or crunchy… and it smells like heaven, and it tastes even better.

That’s what I mean – the finishing step.

In my case, I had written a wrapping-up sequence of events which tied up the loose ends of the plotline and left the reader with closure. The trouble was, it didn’t. Quite. It was at the gloopy stage, with all the ingredients tucked into the mess but with no real cohesion or meaning to it.

So I stuck it into the metaphorical oven – went back over the book once again, saw where major ingredients were playing an important part, figured out what they meant, figured out what they (as it were) foreshadowed and what still needed to be stirred in and where – and then I looked at it again, and lo! It was now baked, and tasty, and ready to serve.

Many a writer starting out has discovered that ending a book is one of the hardest things that an author is called upon to do. Endings, by virtue of the fact that they are the last thing that your reader sees of your novel, are the last chance you will have to make that reader’s experience a satisfying one. And it’s tough balancing act – you have to provide closure without writing something so impossibly and unbelievably pat that nobody in their right mind would believe for a moment that anything of the sort could possibly have happened (and blam! Goes your willing suspension of disbelief – and once it’s gone it

S GONE and that is all your readers are going to remember – that you couldn’t end the book in a way that left them satisfied and still believing in your world….) You have to balance  a certain amount of cliffhangerism with a certain amount of fatalism – it’s two sides of the same damn coin, and sometimes it feels like the coin is a Moebius coin with only one face and the only way you can provide EITHER of those things is by providing both at once. And that is hard, VERY hard.

There is also the inexactitude of the matter, up to a point, which is why it’s sometimes so hard to step on a story’s tail. Some beginners will cope with this problem by cutting off the story too soon, leaving the reader gasping for air at the end and going, yeah, and THEN what happened…? Others will compensate in the other direction, and will still be telling the yawning reader EXACTLY what had happened, many pages after the story had actually ended.

And there is little in the way of educating yourself on this that you can do, as a writer, other than by doing copious amounts of two things:

1. READING – the more you read the easier it will become for you to learn to recognise the perfect ending in the perfect time frame, or lack of it, and that will percolate into your own work eventually; and
2. WRITING – the more you write the more of a feel you are getting for your own style, for your preferences, for the things that you are GOOD at – and the more stories you tell the easier it becomes to figure out where best they are ended. This may never become an infallible skill – all of us still make mistakes, even years into our publishing careers – but you get better at seeing it, the more practice you put in.

For those of us lucky enough to have them, beta readers are invaluable at this stage. If a reader points to a spot which is a chapter and a half back from where you ended your novel and tells you that the story ends THERE, you’d better pay attention – because that extra padding of a chapter and a half may have muffled that last resonant phrase or event that you wanted your reader to take away with them when they finished the book, rendering those things too distant and too muddled to stay in the memory. Result? Your book’s ending fizzles. The reader puts it down… and forgets it.

Ask someone about last lines. Go look at the concluding paragraphs of your favourite books or stories. As a perfect example of what I am talking about, go and re-read “Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C Clarke for as perfect an ending as you can have in a story. I defy you to forget the words of his last sentence, or the image they are leaving in your mind.

Writing has many suggestions, lots of advice, much of it contradictory or confusing – but there are two very important things that will help carry you through a sagging middle, if you have that problem. The two things are BEGIN WELL and END EVEN BETTER. Those are the things that your readers carry with them when they put your book down. Make them remember your envoi, and they’ll remember the book, and they will remember your name.

The best thing you can ever do, as a writer, is come to a good end.

So. When you end a piece of work, remember that all you’ve done is mixed the proper ingredients together. Remember that there is one last step left before you can call it quits.

It isn’t enough to just END it.

You have to FINISH it.

Did you ever see the moment when individual people poured into a city street, channelled by houses and parked cars and city intersections, tributaries flowing in from side streets, fallling into step with other people and joining in, then suddenly changing, re-forming, giving voice to something that has a thousand hearts but no conscious mind, the metamorphosis of a handful of people into a crowd… and then into a mob?

I have. It’s frightening. Human beings who lose their humanity and turn into a multi-headed hydra monster capable of most anything, with human conscience silenced and hidden away and even the memory of things done under such hypnotic mass action often blurred and changed and twisted and buried afterwards. People who turn into nothing more than a voice, a roar, a fury, a release of chaos and a desire to burn and destroy and find something, somebody, to be a target for their anger.

Mobs – the blurred beast of many faces, the roar of a thousand throats that changes from a human voice, a human shout, to the thunder of a wounded lion-god about to exact its vengeance for its spilled blood.

I’ve looked at crowds that way.

Did you ever find yourself at a crowded picnic on, say, the Fourth of July, or a packed crowd on New Year’s Eve somewhere like Times Square or Trafalgar Square, or part of a jubilant heaving mass of people at a victory parade throwing confetti at heroes and ready to kiss a stranger walking by out of sheer overflow of joy? At Obama’s election night rally in Chicago?

The kind of gathering where two people who do not know one another might catch each other’s eye and nod and smile, and hug for no reason, and squeal with joy and sheer enjoyment at some spectacle or at the prospect of some person’s advancement or victory, and share something that is a visceral happiness, something wordless and yet utterly and instantly communicated by a quick grin, or a thumbs-up, or the waving of a flag?

I’ve looked at crowds that way.

Did you ever watch a realistic movie depiction of a battlefield? The kind where people scream and clash and fall and are trampled in the mud and the blood – the ring of steel on steel, the stench of powder and the smell of human sweat, human blood, human fear? The utter chaos of the melee, or the complete waste of charging from trenches into the mouth of enemy machine guns? The scream of dying horses? The hiss of arrows, or the whine of bullets flying past? The panicked rout of the side which is losing?

I’ve looked at crowds that way.

Have you ever looked at a crowd through the eyes of a single character in a story – sometimes not seeing the crowd at all, just seeing the reaction on a single person’s face to something that he is watching? Can anyone remember the expression on the face of Dr Zhivago as he watches the slaughter of the protesters in the square from his balcony, appalled, helpless, unable to do anything at all but bear witness…?

Because that is what you are, as the writer. The one who bears witness.

It was Stalin who said that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. This is true, and there is no way that you as a writer can adequately convey the magnitude of a massacre, or of a genocide. But somewhere in those million deaths which are a statistic there are a handful of characters whose deaths are your tragedy, and they exemplify your statistic, they make your statistic horrible in a way that you could never do if you simply tried to go global in your description.

We are individuals. We connect to individuals. Newbie actors or public speakers are often told that to combat stage fright they should find a single friendly face in an audience and speak as though addressing that person alone. We seek out other individuals whose stories we can share – stories that are part of some greater whole, but which are easier to grasp, to understand, to hear, to mourn, to condemn or to reward. The key to writing a main protagonist’s interaction with any kind of crowd is picking a few key players in that crowd and making the entire crowd matter because THESE people matter.

It’s the trick of concentrating on some of the people, all of the time – when you aren’t talking about all of the people some of the time.

Even that mob of which I spoke, the single-minded avatar of destruction which flows like lava and is just as unstoppable – even that has individual components. Your protagonist might be caught up in the mob or watching them from the safety of a second-floor window but even while understanding the immensity of this new monster which is many-people-at-once there will be a face here, a rolling eye there, a raised fist somewhere else, that will catch the eye – that will exemplify, bring into clarity and focus, the things that the mob stands for, has gathered for.

Often it’s a few exchanged words that will help. Not necessarily with a full-fledged or even named secondary character. Just somebody – somebody in a crowd, someone whose voice, for just a moment, is heard saying something individual and focused, something that the protagonist might hear, be listening for, or may nearly miss because of all the other things going on but which is utterly important anyway.

If it were possible to take a photo with both a fish-eye lens and a telephoto lens at once, this might be what you are aiming for with a protagonist interacting with groups or crowds. You take a fish-eye photo, giving the big picture, giving the global overview, giving a sense of numbers and of mood and of the chaos inherent in any gathering of human beings – and yet you are also looking straight through that wide angle shot and seeing an individual face here and there, focusing on a twist of the lip, a gleam in the eye, a gesture of the hand, the way the light falls on an upturned face, the sound of a single word.

Have you ever looked at the crowds that surround your protagonist? They are many. They are one. It doesn’t matter whose the single voice is when you need one from out of the mutltitude. Just make sure there IS one.

Watch out for the POV. You cannot know the thoughts of a thousand people. Your protagonist can never quite completely comprehend the things that swirl around him or her out in the world. Part of the story you are telling consists of the misapprehensions and misunderstandings between human beings – and the more of them there are, the more misunderstandings are possible, even probable. But you cannot speak with a thousand voices at once – because then you pass from misunderstanding to incoherence.

Think of it in terms of the song (paraphrased):

“I’ve looked at crowds from both sides now

from pain and joy

and still somehow

it’s crowds’ individuals I recall

I really don’t know why

At all…”

One of the proudest moments of my writing life occurred when a friend from Florida phoned my new home in the Pacific Northwest of the USA at midnight my time (3 AM hers) and screamed, “You KILLED HER! How could you kill her? How could you do that?”

She was talking about a main protagonist, and I would have hoped for a reaction like this for the demise of a character of that ilk, fully fleshed out and lovingly helped along the way to becoming as “real” as any flesh-and-blood creature ever encountered by the reader. More real, in fact, because this character was someone who, over the course of a novel, became an intimate, a friend, someone whom the reader cares about deeply – with far more passion than they would care about the identity, fate, or motivations of an arbitrary commuter with whom they might briefly share a few moments on the bus and then probably never see again. The degree of realness is not a variable of physicality. Novels depend on their success, to a huge extent, on how “real” their characters are to their readers.

But those are protagonists, the carriers of plot and story, and if the reader does not respond to them (or responds to them in the wrong way) the entire novel is at risk of imploding. There is nothing worse for a novel than the application of the Eight Deadly Words by the reader: “I Don’t Care What Happens to These People”. The readers have to care. They have to care with a degree of passion. Otherwise… it’s all just wind turning pages.

There are other characters who inhabit a story, however. On a recent convention panel, this kind of character was referred to in a cavalier manner as “The Third Spear Carrier On The Left” (or TTSCOTL for short); those who have a certain background might know some of them as Red Shirts; for the rest of the readers they might get lumped into a general corral which is labelled “secondary characters”.

Well, but that isn’t quite there, either. A true Red Shirt is a throwaway, possibly a character with no lines at all, somebody who plays the role of a witness in the crowd or a piece of cannon fodder, depending on circumstances. But a true secondary character has a little more weight than that – more engagement with the reader, despite being on stage for a very limited time in an extremely limited role.

And apparently I’m remarkably good at engaging heartstrings for a non-major-protag character only to have them shuffle off the mortal coil and out of the novel just because I’m, like, totally heartless and without feeling – at least according to an Australian friend, a devoted reader of my work, who has a perennial quibble about me and such characters. She and I have occasionally discussed what these secondary characters owe their creator, the story in which they appear, and the readers who encounter them in those stories.

I said that sometimes what such a character owes the story and the reader is… perhaps unfairly… a poignant demise, a manner of death which drives a story forward and builds the character of the protagonist in some way.

I look at that concept – “a poignant demise” – and kind of feel like a bloodthirsty Aztec deity waiting, slavering, for the human sacrifice which will ensure my power (or my survival). But there’s more to it than that, as always.

Secondary characters can sometimes be utterly essential, even pivotal, with an entire storyline turning on a word or a deed which was uttered or performed by a character who NEVER had center stage, nor wanted it. They can make things easier, or make things harder. But the most important thing about them is… that they have their OWN stories. Those stories are just not the story being told right here, right now.

There are a couple of secondary characters in my “Changer of Days” books who exemplify this idea, and they fall neatly into two convenient sub-categories – the under-hero(ine), and the under-villain. If you have not read the books and wish to, and don’t particularly want spoilers, now’s the time to look away…

Okay.

The one character whom my Australian friend has never quite forgiven me for is Queen Senena from “Changer of Days”. Senena enters as someone who is almost a non-entity – she is the replacement for a barren first wife, for an usurper-king who desperately needs an heir and a bride to produce it.

All he sees in Senena is a barely-budded, biddable child, old enough to bear him the needed heir, young enough to be cowed and bullied into being a compliant companion when wanted and relegated into seen-and-not-heard when the King had better things to do. And a lesser creature, an ordinary woman, a throwaway child-bride character, would have done just that, and faded away into the background. But Senena is made of sterner stuff, and she has a mind of her own, and a spine. When she finds out the unspeakable things that her husband has done she does not crumple on the floor and whimper – she steps up to the problem and grasps its thorny vine with both delicate hands, defies her husband, countermands his orders in his absence.

When the cruel King returns she will inevitably pay for all this – but at the same time she is finally pregnant and at the very least the punishment will have to be delayed, and his temper might cool with time. So she takes her chances, the little Queen, showing unexpected strength and moral convictions and taking control of something that she ought never to have even had any knowledge about – and yes, she pays for this dearly. She commands the release of an important prisoner – the novel’s protagonist – from the King’s dungeons, in order that said prisoner might have a walk under the free and open sky. The friends of the prisoner – the character whose name has been mine ever since I entered the cyberworld, Anghara, the rightful heir of the throne which the King has stolen – know this is their only chance to free her from the King’s clutches. They take it. There are inevitable casualties. One of them… is the little Queen who made it all possible.

Senena is a light in that novel. When that light is extinguished, the darkness is, for a moment, overwhelming. But she will ALWAYS be a light. Her memory will remain a light. Her spirit will shine like a star in the night, guiding others to try and aspire to be like her. For a secondary character, she has achieved a great deal.

The second secondary character of note is a young man by the name of Ansen. Heir to his father’s estate, a young aristocrat with a severe sense of entitlement, he sees it as his absolute right to take what he wants because it is due him. When one such act results in appalling consequences – he loses the sight of one eye – he becomes deeply embittered, and focused on only one thing: what he sees as his rightful revenge.

This takes the form of betraying his cousin, the same Anghara whose escape from the King’s dungeons caused Senena to meet her death, to the King who has long been seeking her – knowing that the King seeks Anghara for no pleasant purpose and that only her own demise might finally clear his own claim to the throne.

Ansen goes seeking the King, thinking only of how his news of Anghara and her whereabouts might impact on his own future – how the King, whom he idolises, will be grateful for the information that Ansen is bringing, how his reward will be status and power and a place at the court. Unfortunately, he reaches the King in the aftermath of a choice which, once made, has irrevocably scarred the King’s own soul. The King is not interested in Ansen, or in his news. He makes an instant and arbitrary decision and sentences Ansen himself to a traitor’s death – he is to be hanged at dawn.

Unaware of this – locked up by himself in a room overnight but expecting to be able to see the King in the morning – Ansen is happy, excited, to see the King’s minion in the morning, and asks for a comb, for a washcloth, so that he can make himself presentable to the King. Slowly the reality of it all sinks in, though, and the last we see of him is a frightened child – which, after all, is very much what he still is – being led off to his execution.

The King glances at the procession through his window, and looks away – and Ansen never knew that he had had even that much of the King’s attention.

“Who was that?” one of the King’s companions asks curiously as the King turns away from the window.

“Nobody,” the King says, and forgets.

Outside, a young man’s wasted life, filled with slaking an aristocrat’s appetites and the simmering resentment and fury when that ability was taken away, is over as a new day breaks. It seems that he had done nothing, achieved nothing, that even in his death he had no more status than being called a nobody by the King whom it had been his desire to serve.

He might be a villain… but in the end he is pitiful, and his despairing death manages to pull at a reader’s heartstrings even while they’re satisfied that he has finally got his comeuppance. And he does not die entirely in vain. His life, after all, might be taken… as a lesson to others.

That’s what secondary characters do, that’s why they’re there – good secondary characters DO have entire lives of their own, lives hinted at in the narrative where they are not the primary plot carriers but lives which could nevertheless fill their own books if they were to focus on such individuals.

In other words, the way I write, the way I see a story, there really are no “secondary” characters, no character who is unimportant, who does not matter at all. Lives touch in unexpected ways – and a “secondary” character in one novel is no more than a protagonist of their own story who happened to wander into the current tale just long enough to make their presence felt. It is important, to my mind, to have such characters exist because they are the eyes and the souls through which a protagonist measures him or herself; they are the history through which the protagonist’s own story is woven.

Guy Gavriel Kay uses this concept to wonderful effect in “Last Light of the Sun”, where he weaves in the histories of people you meet only briefly and in passing – who barely touch the lives of his protagonists, if at all – but whose presence in the book enriches and deepens the narrative, gives it a context, gives it soul, gives it a sense of not being “just a novel” but instead being a window into real lives and real troubles and real joys, something that happens in a real world, a world full of “other” people whose effect on the POV characters can sometimes be only that they exist, and that by their existence they prove that there is a true world in that novel, a world whose boundaries are not defined by the covers of a given book, and which lures the reader further in and deeper in and invites the total immersion which defines a sense of wonder and a willing suspension of disbelief as they step into a world created by a mind different than their own.

Protagonists – primary characters – carry a story on their shoulders.

Secondary characters make the story possible, believable, real. Yes, sometimes they die. But sometimes… their very death within the story makes them immortal.

Senena still has a hold on my Australian friend, years after she has finished and laid down the book in which the little Queen made her appearance. Senena was not, never tried to be, a protagonist – but in her own way she caused just as much drama when she died as the main protag whose own demise caused my Florida reader to call me at three in the morning in outraged disbelief.

And in some ways… Senena’s may be the greater achievement

The classic writing advice flung at the feet of the novices is the catchy “Write what you know” dictum. Those four words have generated more discussion and frustration than possibly any other piece of advice ever proffered. I don’t have to wade through all that again, not here, it’s been said so many times, so may places, and by so many people, it’s like the water table in low-lying lands, dig just a little and it’ll come pouring out to fill the hole. Its merits or lack thereof I will thus leave to others to continue discussing.

So what I propose to do here, instead, is a series of articles illustrated by things that I myself “know”, the lessons I’ve taken from events in my own life… and see where that takes us.

There are many different kinds of writers and they gravitate by instinct to different kinds of story. There are writers who find it easier and more organic to approach stories as being plot-driven, as a series of events leading from a causative effect to a given conclusion, with the journey between these two points clearly signposted by plot developments, with Things That Need To Happen Now for the story to move forward. I suspect these writers are the kind who find it easier to write outlines and synopses than I do – because I’m the OTHER kind of writer, for me the story is what happens to the characters, the thing that makes the characters change. The drama of the story – the laughter and the tears, the joy and the tragedy, the triumph and the failure – is not the basic building block. The thing that drives me is how my charaacters respond to a stimulus of a given kind, and it doesn’t matter precisely what kind of triumph and disaster befalls them so long as it’s the KIND of thing that will make htem change in a given way. I am an emotional writer, not necessarily a “logical” one in the sense that all my ducks have to be in a row before my story can be written – I write to seek an emotional truth, and often the road I take to my destination can be a surprising one.

Books and movies often come with the disclaimer that the story is wholly fictional and that the characters resemble no people living or dead – which is of course almost impossible to achieve because every character that a writer sketches on a page is to some extent based on people that (s)he knows. Write what you know – here is where that comes in.

Let me tell you a story now, and see if you too will “know” the emotion behind it.

When I was about sixteen years old, I was living in South Africa, studying towards my A-Level examinations (those, for my American readers, are what come after O-levels, the school-leaving examination; it is the A-levels that take you on to University, though, that final extra step between school and college). Because the only school that offered the A-levels – a British qualification and not a South African educational system requirement as such – was a boys’ school, they only admitted a select small number of girls into this post-matriculation senior class. Therewere, I believe, seven of us, all sixteen or so, and believe me, you don’t know what paranoia is until you walk down the halls of a school filled with pre-pubescent boys whose whispered conversations abruptly cease as you come within hearing range and who then follow you with carefully schooled expressions until you turn a corner and move out of sight at which point you hear the sussurus of the conversation begin again… but I digress. My point is that of the seven of us, four were from out of town, and needed boarding facilities. It was obviously not feasible to carve out a boarding environment for four sixteen-year-old females in a school packed with young males – there would have been a riot. So we boarded at a nearby girls’ school, not precisely a part of that school in the sense that we didn’t actually attend it but quartered there in a special wing, with our own little rooms in an eyrie in a wing that took up an entire side of the main entrance quad, and accessed from it; another side of said quad housed the administrative staff and their quarters, including the Headmaster’s office (bear with me, this becomes important background info in a minute). The quad itself was a beautiful little garden, with pathways surrounding a central grassy square which housed a bed of fragrant roses, and the quad was redolent with their scent in the summer.

During the year that I was there, one of the other four A-level candidates and mydorm-mate and next-door-neighbour in our little senior wing was a Greek girl who had ripened early in the manner of Mediterranean womanhood. At sixteen, this girl – let’s call her S – had all the curves of a grown woman twice her age, with rounded hips and an eye-popping bust which was an all too frequent subject of those falling-silent conversations between the younger boys at our OTHER school. She was pretty, but not stunning, not a head-turner in a goddess-come-to-life kind of way.

When S announced the imminent visit of a cousin, the rest of us in the boarders’ wing expected something much like her.

What we got, instead, was Apollo.

The cousin in question turned out to be a young man, some 19 years of age, tall and with the kind of muscular athletic build that was the perfect frame to set off the bad-boy black motorcycle leather jacket that he wore… to go with the motocycle on which he roared into the parking lot while we all hung out of the windows to watch his arrival. When he took off his helmet and shook out those golden curls, we were all lost, and S introduced him to us with a proprietorial air, with her arm linked in his. He had an easy smile and huge blue eyes to match that vivid spun-gold hair – and dammit all, he was a NICE bad boy, to boot. He was pleasant, he flirted with all of us and smiled at all of us and had a way with us that made it easy to relax and not turn into a gaggle of giggly schoolgirls fawning on him with tongue tied adoration. He was, not to mince words, flat-out gorgeous, inside and out.

When the girls school where we boarded announced their annual summer dance that year, something gave me the courage – and, having somehow (I don’t even remember how) come into possession of D’s phone number, I called him from the public phone in the main hallway of the school, with practically no privacy and blushing scarlet and glad he wasn’t there to actually see me do this, and asked him if he would like to come as my date. He accepted. I subsequently had to deal with a week’s worth of sulks from S, my dorm-mate, who had planned on asking him herself but just happened to be a little slower off the mark.

The night of the dance was a perfect balmy summer evening, the sky full of stars, the roses in the school’s entrance quad lending their own scent of enchantment to the occasion. D turned up on time and stripped off his leather jacket to change into a jacket and tie. He was a perfect escort. He danced, and danced well, which was by no means a given when it came to gangly adolescent boys – and in point of fact he stood out from the rest of the pimply boyfriends paraded around by the fact that he wasn’t a gangly adolescent boy any more, he was an enchantingly poised young man with more charm than seemed fair for a single person to possess. In between dances he made sure I was supplied with whatever drinks were on offer. He excused himself once to dance with his cousin, which was only polite, and which served to mollify S somewhat to the point that she could go on and enjoy the rest of the evening.
It was a magic night.

The dance was nearly thirty years ago, and details of the evening have long vanished from my mind – but I do remember, vividly, the finale.

The boarding school’s curfew was usually midnight but because of the dance this had been extended by special dispensation until 2AM. Sometime around half past twelve D and I began to drift back from the hall where the dance was held towards the main quad and its atmosphere of attar-of-roses; we were in no hurry to go anywhere or to say good night, we were deep in conversation, and when we reached the quad we stood there on the pathway and talked some more. The Headmaster, apparently working very late that night, emerged from the administrative wing as we stood chatting in the quad and passed us with a nod and a fairly loaded “Good night”; we said, “Good night, sir”, and watched him round the corner of the quad and move out of sight.

We were still there when the Headmaster came back, about an hour later.

I remember this scene because it seemed to me that I had somehow slipped out of my own body, and I was watching the events from across the sleeping roses. There I stood, leaning with my back against a red brick pillar, my hands folded between me and the warm brick and one foot resting lightly against the pillar base tucked behind the other. There D stood, leaning in over me slightly, one of his hands in his pocket and the other leaning flat-palmed against the pillar right next to my shoulder. We were smiling at one another. The Headmaster came round the same corner which he’d vanished behind earlier, saw us, did a beautiful double-take, glanced at his watch, raised his eyebrows. But it was still not quite the witching hour of two o’clock and he had not even caught us holding hands let alone anything beyond that. But although he said nothing the set of his shoulders and the slight frown on his face spoke volumes – “It is time this ended.”

He vanished, again, and I found that I had dropped my eyes and could not, for the life of me, lift them again to D’s face. Somehow all the easy familiarity of the moment had fled, transmuted into a vivid tension that left a coppery taste of what was almost fear in the back of my throat. Up until this moment, I had not thought beyond what would happen next, how this evening would end. Now, I could think of nothing else. And it came, his hand, just as I was expecting it to, landing gently on my cheek, cupping my chin, lifting my fact until I had to look at him again. His blue eyes were laughing, but in a good way, in such a good way.

“I suppose he’s right,” D said. “Good night. Thank you for a lovely evening.”

And he kissed me.

I honesly don’t remember if that was my first kiss or not – if anything had come before that, it was obviously not memorable enough to stick in my mind.

But perhaps what made this one stay with me for so long was not this night itself, magic though it had been, but what came after.

About a week after the dance S came stumbling into my room, her usually warm ivory skin bleached white with shock. She blurted the news – D had been riding his motorcycle when he was hit from behind by a learner driver who accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake and slammed into him with sufficient force to skid the bike sideways and send him flying forward across the handlebars… straight into the path of another car coming from the opposite direction. They took him to the hospital, a broken doll with multiple fractures and a slew of internal injuries. All of this, they fixed with a series of eye-wateringly long and complex surgeries.

S relayed the developing news as it happened – the surgeries, the aftermath, the recovery at home. But she did not tell me that there was one thing they did not fix, they did not know how to fix.

I phoned, after he was home, to speak to him, to wish him well. I spoke to someone friendly, polite… but with no memory of who I was, or, not too long into the phone conversation, of who he had started talking to at all. His mother took the phone and told me that he had suffered profound psychological consequences as well as the physical trauma of the accident. He had simply ceased to be able to hold any long-term memories at all.

He was nineteen years old. He had been gorgeous, bright, kind, with a life full of promise stretching into the future… and now the future was gone.

I never saw him again. I don’t know what became of him. I had no time to fall in love, not really, but I might have done, if given a chance – and I still remember him with a quiet happiness. But I also think of him whenever some senseless tragedy falls into my path. For thirty years I have carried the memory and the presence of a boy who had had my name, my face, my very existence erased from his mind.

Write what you know. This is part of my emotional truth, the taste of the bitter with the sweet, the sense that the world is wonderful and unfair all at once, that viciously bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it. When I write characters who love, or cling to a fading faith, or yearn, or are struck with a sudden paralysing shyness in the face of a magic moment – it is this that I come back to, this scene in the album of the pictures of my life.

Love, and loss. And life. As always was, as always will be. You know this.Writing what you know doesn’t mean taking a scene or a character or a sequence of events or a setting absolutely verbatim from the fabric of your own existence. If we all did that, then we would have but one story to tell – our own, and nothing else would matter or could impinge on that. But our stories are never just ours. We touch so many other lives, so many other stories – and every one of those touches us back. All of this, we know. And can write about.

Here endeth the first lesson. Go you, now, and write.