For the fiction writer, however, “what if” is the perfect catalyst for Story.
Sarah and I have just returned from a well-earned break to the Greek island of Kefalonia (or Cephallonia if you’re a local). It was a week of sun, sand, sea and… not writing. And you know I almost, almost achieved the latter. Almost, apart from those two little words that have been going around my head since I was twelve years old (though probably since I was about 3).
“What if” has been behind everything I’ve written from my very first story, The Vent (“what if” I was stuck in a ventilation vent? “What if” I wasn’t alone in there?) to The Secret War (“what if” angels and demons were walking the streets in Napoleonic Europe? “What if” my lover was murdered by a slavering, unholy creature of fire and flesh?). It’s never far away, to the
point that my workspace (see below) reminds me of the very reason I write: to answer that “what if” question in the best way I can, even if I have to make it up, because let’s face, that’s what fiction writers do – we bullshit our answers but try to make them as plausible as possible. Hell, if we can make you - the reader - believe them, then they must be right, right?But I’ve rudely interrupted myself, we were talking about “what if” weren’t we? And that whole thing about not writing while taking a holiday in Greece?
Best intentions and all that, well I failed, but not spectacularly. I did write, but only a handful of handwritten notes with a handwriting pen that seemed to dry out at every crucial point in the writing (if you were in Lassi, Kefalonia last week and saw a bearded tourist, slightly sunburnt and flapping his hand around like someone with an absurd version of OCD, then that would be me trying to shake his pen into working again).
In my defence - like I need one (yeah, phoney bravado I know, but I promised Sarah I wouldn’t write while I was away) - it was Sarah who prompted the “what if”. It was Sarah who brought up The Isles of Sheffield, how she enjoyed the sound of the story/anthology and wondered what I’d do with the project now. And so I got talking about it, and while I was muttering about how little time I have to devote to it, and how the next three books seem pretty set in stone, I got that tingle at the base of my neck, the goose-bumps over my arms and those two words came into my thoughts: “what if”. In this case, it was “what if” Sheffield now resembled the Ionian Islands, such as Keffalonia? Could that be stretching the imagination a little? Not so, if you take global warming, rising seas (the core setting for The Isles of Sheffield) into consideration, and it seemed at that moment the place where we were holidaying could be the setting for the anthology: cicadas, sun and sand and sludge.
And then the following day “what if” went that little bit further. What if there were no more sunbathers? What if it was too dangerous to sunbathe, or because the world has moved on, no one has time to sunbathe? There are no more bikinis, the brown frothy slop of the sea is no longer fit to swim in, and the sandy beaches are under many feet of stagnant water. Yet, in this fiercely hot world, on a bank of wasteland and shit-coloured swill that stinks like swamp, a lone sunbather appears. Why is she there in a world that has moved on, horribly and catastrophically so? Where did she get that washed out bikini that’s frayed around the edges? Who is she doing this for? “What if…”
So there it goes, how it starts, and the rest is history written on the page in quickly congealing ink. Honestly, I didn’t write much of the story while I was away. I spent very little time on it, and Sarah wasn’t really mad with me. I think. But when those two little words take hold, it’s hard to shake them loose.
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