On the Verge – The Arrow of Time – Page 324

Better late than never, right? Here’s the new page for the week!

I promised to share some thoughts about the things in this story – where they came from and what my perspective on it actually is. So today, I wanted to start with these two (Hannah and Jeremy) and their relationship.

One of the major drivers of this whole storyline is the relationship between these two characters. You always hear writers telling people to write what they know – so that’s what I really did here. Way back when I was starting this project (so Fall 2010), my wife and I had only been married for a short period of time and before that we’d dated, lived together, been engaged… it was kind of where my head was at. So I wrote what I knew which was two characters in a relationship, how they interacted and what they’d do for each other. I don’t really mean that this is a personal story in any way and reflects me personally, but at the same time, I do understand what being in a relationship with someone is like, so I basically wrote that.

Now the interesting thing to me is that this is definitely NOT what I set out to write. I set out to write a cool little sci-fi story with some invisible thieves, disappearing people, time travel and weird technology. But once you actually sit down and have to put people into situations, you really need them to be relatable and have relationships.

I think one of the reasons why I ended up rejigging the start of the story as much as I did was because I kept going back in and adding in more stuff with Hannah and Jeremy. By the time I’d gotten into Chapters 4 and 5, I knew where the story was going and how important their relationship was, so I needed to establish that relationship right away. This meant really setting up Jeremy being away and travelling, which carried over to Chapter 3’s conversation between Hannah and Jane when they’re getting coffee. It’s obviously not been easy on Hannah with Jeremy being away on a book tour and becoming a celebrity scientist… But when he disappears, things kind of crystalize for her and, Hannah being Hannah, she does everything she can to get him back.

To bring this full circle, this last chapter has really been about wrapping everything up. So once we’d touched base with all of the characters, it was really a matter of coming back to Hannah and Jeremy – which is where we’re at with two pages to go and them deciding that they need to make time for them (something I think is actually an important message for any relationship to work!).

Anyway, I think this aspect of the story has been the one to surprise me most because I didn’t really intend to have it. But I think the story is a million times better because of it.

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I haven’t given an update lately because I’ve just been too damn busy. But today I wanted to hint that I’m currently working on a big new exciting project and I’m hopefully going to be able to start sharing stuff soon!

Other than that, I’m looking forward to getting back to work on Last Chance later today and we’ll see how it goes from there.

As always, thanks for reading and come on back next week and we head to the finish line!

Source: On the Verge