The new novel features a multi-generational family, living in a series of apartments in North London. I could have sketched out the family tree on the back of an envelope, determining for myself how many they were, their ages and relationships. It would have taken me say forty-five minutes at most. Instead I spend three mornings last week building a little excel model that would give me the answers randomly. Was this just procrastination?
Yes, it was procrastination. The first stages of writing a novel can be a hard slog, if you are not quite sure how you are going to do what you want to do. It’s easy to get diverted onto ancillary tasks. And when it comes to excel, I am still in rehab.
But it was not just procrastination. Introducing a random element can throw up things I hadn’t initially thought of. It turns out that in the first generation of my family one sister has no children, one has six, one three. How has that happened, and how do they all feel about it? Whatever each of them feels, it’s likely to run pretty deep. Do they speak their feelings or try to suppress them? And in my second and third generations, one of the children from a character’s Marriage 1 has turned out younger than either of the children from Marriage 2. OK, so I got a bug in my age-generation rules somewhere, but let’s go with it. Marriage 2 now looks like an interlude in an on-off Marriage 1. What’s the story here? It might be quite spicy…
Such questions can be useful. They get the creative process going (see elsewhere thoughts on the seed of a pearl). Even if I devote no more than half a sentence to resolving them, they help the characters come off the page for me, acquire their own light and shade, take on dimensions. Life, as most of us live it, is not determined. It is chaotic. These random prompts help me to convince myself that my characters will be real people, and not just my scratchings on some envelope.
But with minor acts of creation like this, there’s also the exciting possibility that, at some point later in the telling, they will become important in a way I hadn’t envisaged when they first popped up on the page. Those who are used to creating spontaneously know this well. The story feeds on itself, like a storm building. What you have written influences how you will write the next bit. The old clock that you put in the hall for atmosphere turns out to be just the clue you need for your scene three chapters later. The casual, enigmatic phrase that you dropped into a conversation because you thought it sounded good starts you thinking and – Eureka! – it turns out not to have been casual at all. Famously, Tolkein admitted that when he wrote the scene in which the hobbits first met Strider, he had no idea who this sinister new character was, or whether Strider was even going to be a good guy. He just needed the hobbits to meet someone sinister. And in the end, of course, quite a lot turns on Who Strider Really Is.
So having said all that, can I really claim that those three mornings were time well spent? I don’t know yet. Let’s see how this one builds.
Last Updated on July 27, 2026 by John