When everything changed

Histories - Part III - When everything changed

Huge apologies for how late in the weekend this is – the weather was just too glorious to ignore today. I hope you’ll forgive me. Days like this are just too rare.

Let’s get back to our sheep, as we say in French (yes, one of those idioms that don’t quite translate…), or rather to this post, where I go on at length about my life. I think I left you at the point where I had a plot, a theme and some characters and chapters, but no book. More specifically, I had Lacie and Rowan, Izzie and Lou (whom you haven’t met yet, unless you've read the book), but no Stus. He did not yet exist in my head.

Then something wonderful happened: I got a job at Waterstones.

It was a part-time thing when I was in my third year of university, partly to earn some money to pay back my voluntourism diving in Indonesia, partly to have something on my CV that was actually paid – yes, until then I had always worked for free (I would like to thank my parents for financing me…).

One of my tasks was to shelve books. We had those massive trolleys with books piled up so high I could easily disappear behind one, and somehow you had to perform the magic of putting them on already-full shelves. It required a lot more skill than you might imagine, and although all this book handling is lovely to book nutters, the job itself is quite mindless. You don’t really look at the books anymore, or only enough to know that it will have to fit between James and Johnson. Then you have to take books off because it won't fit, and reshelve them somewhere else, and so you have to fit them between... you get the gist.

Then one day, a title hidden underneath a pile of other books on a trolley caught my eye. I don't know why. It wasn’t even my trolley. I picked it up with trembling hands and read the blurb, hoping it would be as promising as the title. I decided to buy it. Not there and then –  I’ve always found it weird to be a customer in my own workplace. Then I gave it pride of place on my personal bookshelf at home. 

And didn’t read it. I was studying and I find I only want escapism when I’m working. Which this book wasn’t. Then I went to Africa for a year, and considering I had only enough space for three t-shirts, I wasn’t about to try a fit in such a big book. (Ask me about the story of the t-shirts during the rainy season one day. Or ask my mum, she loves to tell that one.)
Then, finally, the following summer, I did read it. And it was just as wonderful as I had hoped. It reinforced a lot of my beliefs about the world, a lot of things I had wondered about when I first learned that the world wasn’t a happy Disney place, and therefore it reinforced my ideas about the theme of my book. Now this is where it gets tricky because I don’t want to give too much away. So I'll just say this: the book is called The Lucifer Effect and it is about the Stanford Prison Experiment. It’s a fascinating field of psychology, so if you don’t know about it, it’s really worth a read.

Now somewhere in the pages of the book something came to me, the realisation that there was something very wrong with my story:  Stus wasn’t in it. I needed to tell the other side of the story, Stus's side. I don’t know how I hadn’t though about it. It was like when you go to the theatre, and at first the spotlight is only on some of the actors, then suddenly the whole stage is lit and you see the bigger picture. Or like playing minesweepers: you click on one square and it reveals a huge area. Whichever analogy suits you best.

A lot about Stus came to me very naturally: his name, his personality, his relationship with his sisters. But he had a lot of catching up to do: I had known the other characters for years. And so when it came to writing, he had a lot less air time. When I finished my first draft, he had barely more than 14000 on a roughly 90 k novel – that’s about 15% (yes, I do love data). That’s rubbish, especially when you consider that the other two point-of-view characters share the same “side” of the story.

A lot of the work I have done since has been on him, and so is a lot of the writing/ rewriting I still need to do.  He forced me to have a much better understanding of Faerie and the Tree Circle, and he has, I think, done a lot for my theme.

In fact, it really wouldn’t be the same without Stus. I wasn’t being overdramatic (for once) when I said in a previous post this book I found by chance changed everything. Suddenly, it all made sense. And I wrote. Admittedly there were periods where I didn’t work, which helped with the writing, but the important thing is that I wrote and didn’t stop.

Then one spring, like the lambs (what is it with me and sheep today?), the book was born. Quivering with fear and grand dreams, I printed the first copy of the first piece of book-length creative writing I had ever seen through. It felt like such as accomplishment: I had written a book. That thing I had said I would do since I was about ten, it was finally done.

Never mind that I had read many times over that it takes as much effort editing as it does writing. I thought it didn’t quite apply to me because I couldn’t think of how I could possibly improve it and any change would be an affront to the core of my story. Now it was written, my characters’ fate was sealed and set it stone. Sure, some of the writing might need minor tweaking, but mostly the book was finished.

How I laugh at this now.