Rewrite: Day 31. Reaching into the past.

The big discovery of the day was that Chapter 14 turns out to be the big reveal. I knew there was one revelation in the offing but, as it has turned out, there were two. But, before I moved on to Chapter 14, I got stuck in to Chapter 13 and made some additions and adjustments to the opening and found myself faced with a conundrum. As an aside, it was interesting to hear this morning on the radio that Sir Walter Scott sometimes referred to his house, Abbotsford, as 'Conundrum Castle'. That speaks volumes because, as novelists, we spend our days solving conundrums.

You can catch the excellent 30 minute radio broadcast by Jim Naughty on Walter Scott, The Man who Made Scotland, for a few days more, at least. The Man who Made Scotland. BBC Radio 4 / iPlayer.

The conundrum I am currently trying to solve is how to allow the protagonist, Broderick, access to the past. I looked on the web for inspiration and found a couple of things. An example from Alice Munro demonstrates one possible solution. She uses mediated journeys to link her protagonist with history and she does it through the narrator and her immediate family making a number of specific 'journeys into the past'.

• Her father takes her back to where they used to live
• Her mother takes her back to a shop they knew
• Her father takes her back to someone's house

By employing this technique, Alice Munro takes the reader back into the past.

See: Dragged into the past TheFreeLibrary.com

In another blog, I found this interesting observation:

Einstein argued that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. By his logic, what one person may experience as four hours may be an entire lifetime for another person.

I'm not sure how this would work but the blog suggests two writing exercises:

• Imagine a character and briefly write their past, future and present. 
• Write about what “having control over time” makes you think of.

See: The Narrator 

The problem with these is that they both deal with the recent past, a past that can be reached within one or two generations. What if you want to connect to the deep past, not one or two generations but many generations? Kate Mosse successfully uses a double story line in Labyrith. Are there other ways it can be done? More work to do here, I think.

See: Kate Mosse on Amazon

Ends