A Round Robin Post

First of all, an apology. All of those who hit the link to my blog expecting a big sci-fi epic are about to be disappointed – today, in our Round Robin blog posts, we have been posed the question:

In what time period do you prefer to set your stories – past, present, or future? What are the problems and advantages of that choice? Would you like to change?

I suppose, as a starting point, I should admit that all of my novels have started in a contemporary setting – they are about events that are happening now, but the present story generally relates to an important back story which is told throughout the book. How I structure the book to contain the backstory is the tricky bit. There is an exception, but I’ll come to that later.

Secondly, I absolutely love writing in the present tense. This has become more fashionable now, but when I wrote my first novel many years ago it was quite unusual. I like the present tense because it is immediate – the reader is in the situation with the characters and there is less chance of just ‘telling’ the story rather than showing it through the actions and responses of the characters. There is no chance of ‘wrong-footing’ your reader as everything is happening page by page.

As my novels have progressed, the way that I ‘time travel’ from present to backstory has got more and more complicated.

My first book was a deliberately linear story, covering a five month period and told from the viewpoint of four main characters. The theme is a woman coming to terms with the loss of a baby through travelling around Scotland with a complete stranger. The loss of the baby is backstory, but is expressed through things that evoke memories and through building trust with someone to confide in.

My second book is my exception and began with a structure that I have used in some way in all my following novels – there is a present storyline interspersed with the backstory both forming their own cohesive narratives. In this book I have very short snippets of the present (the making of a couture wedding dress) preceded by long sections of backstory. This is an unusual book for me as it is narrated first person – a brilliant opportunity to get into the head of a dysfunctional teenager who comes of age through motherhood. However the book is set against a backdrop of the declining clothing industry in Nottingham in the 1990s. This posed a dilemma when I abandoned the book for many years following a marriage break up. When I returned to it the 1990s had gone but the events and characters were pertinent to that time. I completely rewrote the book, and by default it had a ‘historical’ setting (albeit recent) which spoke about a period of history in a city’s life.

The book that is going out to publishers now, my third book, also has a structure that time travels from past to present – each section beginning with a crime committed by a serial killer, then returning to the present to tell the story of his friendship with a woman who was born profoundly deaf and their connection to the fenland landscape. This flowed well, because the present story sections formed a linear narrative to hold things together. I cannot say that I am finding this kind of structure and time slip as easy in the book that I am writing now!

So, to the present (in my writing of books, anyway). The novel I am working on now is proving a bit of a beast to tame! I know exactly what happens, and could have chosen to write this as a direct linear narrative covering the period of a year or so. However the book (currently) begins with an event that falls in the MIDDLE of this narrative – posing problems as to how to go both backwards and forwards with the storyline. I have tried many variations – only last week I restructured the balance of the book – and I still can’t work out where to use past and present tense!

Backwards, forwards, and everywhere in-between – my writing is definitely a bit of a time travelling machine. I, and the reader, never know quite where we might end up!!

Find out more about past, present and future in other writers’ work at:

Marie Laval http://marielaval.blogspot.co.uk/
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Dr. Bob Rich http://wp.me/p3Xihq-14G
Anne Stenhouse http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/
A.J. Maguire http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Judith Copek http://lynx-sis.blogspot.com/
Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Heidi M. Thomas http://heidiwriter.wordpress.com/
Marci Baun http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/
Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com

© Anne de Gruchy