Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Better late

This month’s Futures story in Nature Physics comes from J. Kyle Turner, who highlights some of the less-explored issues with time travel in his story Better late. Kyle kindly offered to take time out from his teaching duties to explain how this story came about — as ever, this post contains spoilers, so it’s best to read the story first.

Writing Better late

Sometime last year — August, I think, or maybe September — an acquaintance of mine was part of a month-long writing challenge wherein the participants had to produce 60,000 words of original fiction over the course of the month. It didn’t matter what form the words took. Freewrites were just as valid as, say, chapters of a novel. The only real rule was the grueling pace of the thing, and as I’d been disappointed with my writing progress at the time, I happily accepted his invitation.

Fast forward to the fifteenth of that month. I was sitting in the corner of my school’s library, exhausted, blank notebook in front of me, and I was looking around the room for anything, anything that I could write about. I’d have settled for an odd-coloured shoelace, or maybe a word or two of someone else’s conversation, but as fate would have it, I caught sight of a poster that listed the days and times that the library was open. Only, instead of the words ‘Library’ and ‘Times’, the poster had been printed with the header ‘Time Library’.

Suddenly I had a building to write about, which did for an opening paragraph. But I needed a character, and I needed one soon, and so I thought, “Why not toss a bitter employee into the mix?” By then the throttle had really opened up, and the only things I needed to figure out were a) why my main character was so bitter about his work and b) what might cause him to come to terms with that conflict. Once I had the answer to both those questions, I had the first draft of Better late.

Comments

There are currently no comments.