This week, Futures is very pleased to welcome Robert Reed to the section, with his story Musings on time travel. Bob has authored a large number of short stories and a good number of novels (as well as winning a Hugo). You catch up with his activities on his website. Here, he kindly offers an insight into the creative process behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Musings on time travel

Forty years of writing, thirty-plus as a professional, and I’ve learned a few tricks. For instance, sometimes my words are rather lovely and possibly a little bit wise, and oh my, I feel justifiably proud to have dreamed them up. But the trouble is that in this particular story, on this particular day, those words don’t belong. They don’t play well with the theme, or they hurt the pace, or they just need some other home. And after forty years in the business, I’ll unceremoniously yank them out of the manuscript, creating a leaner, better product. I hope.

I’ve gotten rather good at pruning and salvaging. I don’t have any use for the standard writing software. I work on the cloud, usually with Google Docs, and I keep a special file called ‘Etceteras’. This is where I bank what might be useful later. And as it happens, one of those discarded bits was a paragraph offering an odd interpretation about life. And more importantly, why does animated water insist on picturing itself as existing inside something called ‘time’?

As it happens, that paragraph didn’t have to wait long. I began a new story, a tale where two time travellers chat amiably. Each character has his own point-of-view, and one of my people needed to voice some interesting thoughts.

I love finding a good job for a set-aside phrase.

And I enjoy pruning overgrown stories. Time is short, for me and for everyone, and if I save two thousand people two minutes each …

Well, that sounds like the beginnings of an interesting story. Don’t you think so?