Diary of a Novel #1 - Plot Holes

Much has happened over the last few weeks. After a splendid Road Trip 2.0 (videos of which can be found here), I'm now back home working on the book. Seems strange to be saying that again. It's been a while.

After detailing the full plot of the book to my wife (she asked) and my son (he...was in the passenger seat on the drive home from Brighton and therefore unable to stop me), it occurred to me there are some plot holes. Quite big ones. So, I've been working on plugging them. Or, more exactly, strengthening the plot so that the holes simple vanish. Easier said than done.

The 15^th century town house, which was the very first building in Avoncroft’s collection

One thing that really fired my imagination was the Town House at the Avoncroft Museum of Buildings. I didn't take any photos, so I've robbed one off their website, but if you want to see my childlike glee as I looked around it, this will take you there (casually skipping my phonebox hijinx at the start of the video). Oh, it's so beautiful. To walk around something from the mid-15th Century, picturing what life might have been like...imagining Raven there. I can't tell you how thrilling it was. Although I do so in the video quite a bit. Quiiiiiiite a bit. There's information about it here.

Anyway, I was talking about plot holes. Or gaps. They were really gaps rather than holes. When I talked some of the children at school about the book, one of the first questions I got asked was about the time machine. Where is it from? How does it work? Who made it? And up until this week, I've never really had answers to those questions. I rather liked (and enjoyed the laziness of) not having given that much thought. Well, no more! Not only do I have answers to all those questions, I have also written precisely the ritual that embued the metronome with its powers. I spent much of today trying to hone my ability to write in the style of someone living in the 17th Century (impossible), whilst reading as many Shakespeare sonnets as I could manage (tedious) and essentially writing and re-writing the same 6 lines over and over again (exhausting). I'm not going to share them here (spoilers!) but I am pretty happy with the six-line incantation I have finally arrived at. But here's a couple of lines of the incantation, in the form of medieval runes:

ᚡᛡᛂᚿ ᛁ ᛑᛂᛔᛆᚱᛐ Þᛁᛍ ᚡᚮᚱᛚᛑ, Þᚤ ᛔᛆÞ’ᛍ ᛒᛂᚵᚢᚿ , ᛂᚿᛑᚢᚱᛂ Þᚱᚮᚢᚵᛡ ᛍᛆᛍᚮᚿᛍ, ᛌᚱᚮᛍᛍ Þᛂ ᛐᚢᚱᚿᛁᛜ ᛍᚢᚿ.

You're very welcome.

The hard part wasn't the incantation itself. I knew pretty well what Raven's mum needed to cover in the ritual: making sure the device would answer only to Raven, and that it would whisk her away in the event of danger (oh yeah...the reason for the time machine existing in the first place was one of the plot holes I had to plug). But. And it's a big but.

But the words need to allow for a degree of...shall we call it...interpretation. You see, the time machine does all the things Raven's mother wanted it to do. But there are some unforeseen implications. Now, my only real exposure to poetry has been when I've had to study it at school/university. Much of that study involved reading not only what the poem says, but what it doesn't say. The art of poetry seems to be saying something without saying it, and then hoping the reader is clever enough to work out what you meant. It's a peculiar medium. Imagine if art was all autostereograms, where you have to stare at it and cross your eyes in order to make out the image. Like this:

Imagine walking around the Tate, or the Guggenheim, and having to spend an hour gawping at every painting to try to work out what it's actually a picture of. Yeah, that's poetry. But that degree of obfuscation was what I wanted for Raven's mum's (she's currenly nameless) incantation: she says these words, but the words she uses carry deeper meaning, and it's in that meaning that much of the time machine's mythology lies. I can't say too much more without giving away spoilers, but suffice to say, that's how I spent my day. It's been tiring, but the incantation is done, and with it, I feel like I have concreted some of that time machine mythology I always needed to figure out.

That's all I've got for you. If you fancy a fascinating but dry read, I recommend The Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th Century treatise on witchcraft. I read a fair bit of that today, too. It's wild. Here's a fun picture of a REALLY old edition of it.