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.
Continue reading “The Story Behind the Story: Vincent’s Penny”