Afterword
As far as I can recollect, this story was the first time I tried out writing something which runs together two chronologically separate narrative threads—in this case the two very different lives which the protagonists are experiencing. Clearly, or at least so I thought, it would be a neat way of building up tension and contrast. So off I went… And I soon found out that this kind of narrative technique requires a much greater amount of planning, backtracking and editing than a more straightforward and purely linear approach. I wasn’t massively discouraged, but I was a little frustrated and surprised.
I was, of course, being extremely naive. I already knew (after all, I’d been trying for years) that writing is, amongst other things, incredibly hard work which requires considerable organisation, practice, determination and thought. But another part of me was whispering that writing is an art, and it should come from the heart, without all this faff and obstacles about what goes where, when and how. That whisper is still in my head: this vision of expression through writing as a climactic outpouring of untrammelled feeling rather than anything more calculated and worked-through. A line of Steely Dan’s lyrics in “Deacon Blue” from their iconic Aja album, pretty much says it all: “Learn to work the saxophone, I’ll play just what I feel…”. Of course, being Steely Dan, the tone is ironic. But, also, being Steely Dan, there’s an underlying sense of disappointed idealism; that this is what the process of creation should really be like.