The golden thread

Here’s a challenge that we all experience, a challenge that in some ways grows larger the more imaginative and effortless you are.

The challenge is simply this: what do you set down as your next sentence? Of the thousand and more things you could say, what do you need to say now?

So let’s say for example that you have an army veteran teaming up with a homeless guy to buy a lottery ticket. They discover that the ticket is worth £1,000,000. (This example, as so much else in these emails now, is inspired by something from Feedback Friday. That said, the way I develop the example here is all mine, for the sake of illustration only.)

Let’s say that the setting is on the street outside the shop where they bought the ticket and that your point of view character is Ed, the army veteran. How do you proceed next. Here are things you might consider talking about:

• The view down the street, perhaps ending in a view of docks, the glitter of water.
• Or the same, but ending in a row of boarded-up shops and the loom of a huge cylindrical gas-holder.
• The look of the ticket itself. The feel of it in the hand.
• A memory of childhood poverty
• Something to do with odds: more likely to be struck by lightning than to get a big win, that kind of thing.
• Something to do with odds, but from Ed’s army days this time. A companion-in-arms killed by a freak shot, perhaps.
• Or Ed’s own role as an army trainer, always calling on the men to consider the risks of any action or non-action.
• Or something in the relationship between the two men – a laugh? An embrace?
• Something to do with a future of money. A holiday Ed might have dreamed of. Or a burden of debt that can now be shed?
• Something purely random. A seagull that flies into a patch of sunlight on an awning, holding a stolen cherry in its mouth.
• Something that touches a romantic or sexual nerve – Ed thinking of a former girlfriend? Or a woman he fancies but has been to shy to properly talk to?

And so on. You could go in any of these directions and none of them are wrong.

In a funny way, you only have to list them out and you build a scene that starts to cohere in a somewhat collage-y, scrapbook-y way. Somehow, even the contradictory views (the gas-holder and the glitter of water) can be assimilated into something that feels real.

So what? Do you put them all down, then scrap the bits that don’t feel so strong on the page? Or just write the first three sentences that come into your head? Or you set yourself a rule? One line on setting, one line on action-in-the-present, one line on memory or reflection?

In looking at your Feedback Friday stuff, one of the commonest issues I see has to do with this exact issue. What people choose to set down in their text isn’t wrong exactly, but it’s not exactly right.

Sometimes the issue is that the reader is being asked to look in five different directions all in one paragraph and the result is confusing. Other times (and most lethally) the reader is being asked to look in a direction where the character would not be looking, with the result that the scene in question pulls away from the character and diminishes them.

As a reader, you feel that issue in your bones. One page like that, you can manage. Three, and perhaps you’re still reading. Ten pages like that? And – well, no one knows, because that reader is no longer reading that book.

And that’s the solution. Your golden thread.

Stay close to your character. Always. No exceptions.

So take our lottery-winning veteran, Ed. He’s just won the lottery. He has a ticket in his hand.

Be him.

What does he see? Think? Say? Do? Experience? Remember?

You could still go more or less anywhere. Any of the bullet points we started with could plausibly go into this moment. But how you do it still matters.

Here are two passages that pick up on that seagull / awning / cherry image. First, a version that works fine:

Ed looked across the street. A patch of sunlight had struck the white awning over the greengrocers. A seagull was perched in the sunlight with a glossy red cherry in its mouth, a cherry stolen from the crates below.

Ed felt the curl of the ticket in his hand. The seagull. The light. The cherry. The ticket. None of it quite felt real, except for the booming wash of a tide which kept saying, “you’ve won, you’ve won.”

That passage gives the reader a dissociated Ed, one where the shock of winning means he’s no longer thinking or feeling quite straight. Not just that, but by combining a bird, some sunlight and a stolen cherry into a single image, we offer up some good metaphorical meat to the reader. Free as a bird, something stolen, a glossy round fruit, something about to take flight? You can mix up the exact sauce as you fancy. That might or might not be how you’d want to write this scene, but it’s a perfectly viable route.

Next, a version that doesn’t work.

Ed looked across the street. A seagull was sitting in a patch of sunlight on a white awning. It had stolen something, a cherry, from the greengrocer’s shop below, and had the fruit in its beak, owning but not eating it.

Stolen fruit. In Fallujah once, Ed had been patrolling with a comrade of his, a sapper called Aaron. Some IED had blown the corner of an old bank building apart, injuring a couple of people and killing the stallholder who had sold fruit from a wooden cart just outside. Ed and Aarron had picked up some fallen fruit – a pomegranate, Ed remembered, some oranges – then got into an argument about whether that counted as theft as not. Aaron had been from a dirt-poor background, always treated Ed – pharmacist dad, nurse mum – as something like a Rolls-Royce driving toff. Aaron had had his arm torn off five days later. A mortar attack from a house that had supposedly been cleared. It had been Ed’s job to tell Aaron’s parents.

None of the content there is necessarily wrong for the book in general. But where’s the lottery ticket? How is Ed thinking about Aaron and mortar attacks and fallen oranges right here, right now?

We’ve basically lost the character and that means we’ve lost the thread of any actual story.

That’s one kind of failure, but the possibility of failure is endless.

Here’s another example.

In one of my books, Fiona is in a cave. The cave is flooded – it’s a big lake, essentially, but an underwater tunnel leads to the outside, so she dives through the tunnel and escapes.

Suppose I had just written, “I saw there must be a passage out, under the water, so I emerged onto a little patch of sandy soil under a low cliff.” That feels wrong, no?

Fiona is not some all-action Special Forces type for whom these things are standard, so it’s absolutely critical to my explanation of her movements that she reflects on the experience of swimming underwater through a tunnel of rock. If I don’t put that reflection into her mind, then the reader will be just perplexed. It’ll feel to the reader like a scratch on a record, some important bit of information simply missing. I was going to quote from that passage here, to show you how I do it in practice, but that tiny moment – escape from the cave – runs to more than 400 words, because the swim mattered to Fiona so it had to matter to the reader.

Follow the character. Your golden thread.