Let the story decide

'How Soon Is Now?' is a complex book built on a simple idea: What if you could go back to be yourself at any point in your life?

This little nugget of an idea rolled around my head for years before finally turning into a story (or to be more accurate, several stories).

Before it evolved into a twisty, turny meditation on love, memory, and the pull of the past using time travel as a storytelling hook,I tried squeezing the idea into several different shapes, but it wasn't keen on sticking with any of them. At various stages, it might have been a knockabout farce, a rose-tinted timeslip romance, a paranoid thriller ...

In the end, the story and characters which formed in my head and on the computer screen began to decide their own shape, and this intricate tale of a disparate group of people, all trawling their own pasts for very different reasons, was the inevitable outcome.

The idea created the characters, and the characters suggested a plot, which then became a place to store all the stories and emotional beats which came with the characters.

After that came together, it was all plain sailing.

Well, no. It wasn't. After that there was a huge amount of rewriting, revising and restructuring to make sure the intricate, looping time travel elements at the centre of the story not only worked, but worked in a way that was true to the people (they were people by this point, not just characters) in the book.

I think it worked, in the end. 'How Soon..?' went through many drafts over several years, but I was always glad to get back to these characters and their stories, every time. That's a good sign, I think. I'm looking forward to introducing them all to new readers, and sharing everything that came from that one little idea all those years ago.