People often ask where stories come from. How you get from the germ of an idea to a completed tale, world-building, characters and all.
The truth is they are all different. Some stories spring fully-formed from wherever wacky ideas come from. Others are planned in meticulous detail. Some branch off from a bigger project. I wrote recently about the way my novel Fifty-One grew out of unfinished business with two earlier short stories. Sometimes the process happens in reverse.
Writing is as much about the words you cut out as those you put in. Completing a first draft can be hard, but that is nowhere near the end of the journey. A few years ago I spent a lot of time working on a novel about a guy who is attacked and killed only to recover consciousness alive but in the body of his murderer. As he tries to avoid being jailed for his own murder, and find out what has caused this calamity, he becomes aware that this has happened to him before, that he has lived a succession of lives, stretching back to the sixteenth century, when he became apprenticed to a shady character called Vincent, who has discovered a means of reincarnating after death.
I worked hard on the novel, but it never quite came together (I may go back to it sometime). But an interesting thing happened during the editing.
Most of the story was told in the third person in the present day, recounting the protagonist’s death and revival, and his efforts to get to the bottom of what has happened. Weaved into this tale was a series of snapshots in the first person of the multiple lives this character had lived in the past (the memory of which he gradually recovers as the story progresses). These were fun to write, and quite pungent in their mix of gritty historical detail and the growing conflict between the young Sebastian and his evil master Vincent. But in truth they didn’t advance the plot of the novel and I cut them all out.
As I continued to grapple with the novel, I also pulled together these off-cuts into a short story. To my surprise, the rejected bits of the novel turned out to be one of the pieces of short fiction I’m most pleased with.
“Vincent’s Penny” was published in Australian online magazine Dimension 6, in April 2019. The story was picked as one of the best of the month in the Barnes and Noble short fiction round-up at the time. Dimension 6 later went out of business, but you can still get that copy of the magazine, free to download here.
Even better, the story was later republished in audio form by fantasy podcast Podcastle (Episode 628). The story gained an extra dimension in the reading by Matt Dovey. I recommend reading the text along with Matt’s interpretation, for most satisfying effect! You can find text and audio here. As you listen, try to imagine the whole lost novel wrapped around it in shadow form!
(By the way, Matt has done a lot of great narrations, as well as writing super stories of his own. You can check out his work at https://mattdovey.com/)
Anyway, here’s a taster of Vincent’s Penny…
Vincent’s Penny
May 1941
I’m a child this time. Five or six years old.
Fully clothed under a bed, on a wooden floor. I touch a hand to my throat, but there is nothing there. I examine my hands and arms, astonished by the smoothness of the skin. At last, I crawl out from beneath the bed and leave the room.
Light from a jagged hole in the roof, blue sky beyond, streaked with horsetails of cloud. The floor is dusted with splinters of wood and brick. The window at the end of the hall has daggers of glass clinging to the frame.
Over the banister, more rubble and destruction below. Some of the stairs are broken, but I pick my way downstairs, helped by the fact that I am so light now, in this child’s frame. I could skip across a field of grass and barely disturb the dew. There is a door at the foot of the stairs. I turn the handle and push, but at first it does not move. Maybe the wall has shifted in the raid. I try again, ramming my tiny shoulder against the wood.
The door releases its grip and tumbles me outside.
The Previous Day
Before they take me out, they put a hood over my head. A hand on my arm guides me down a flight of stairs. On the flat, they shove me forward. Hands pull me to a halt and there is the sound of a car door, before someone pushes down on the top of my head, pressing me inside. As the car engine starts, I hear a loud wailing in the distance.
“Air-raid siren,” I say. “Are you sure we should be going for a drive?”
“No need to worry about Hitler’s bombers,” a familiar voice says. “Nothing he can do to you that’s worse than what Vincent’s got in mind.”
The car gathers speed. The sirens fall away and another sound comes; a strengthening growl high above. I can picture the swollen metal bellies of the Heinkel bombers, stuffed with high explosives. With the motion of the car, I feel the ancient metal disc move on its chain beneath my shirt. Vincent’s penny; maybe it can bring me luck again.
“You can let me go. Who will ever know?”
“Why would we do that?”
“If you let Vincent do this, who will stop him doing worse in the future?”
The car stops, doors open and close. As they lead me away from the car a succession of explosions in the distance makes me flinch. A sound like a giant striding towards us, wading through houses and shops.
The hood is snatched away, revealing a large empty space, an abandoned warehouse. A table and three chairs in the centre of the room. I know I will never leave this place…
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