The first page of any novel is crucial: you can lose your reader in a couple of paragraphs… or even in the first sentence.
I always knew how Those Who Wait would begin. Stephen Ruthyn, orphaned at 15, has been brought to live in Paris by an elderly relative. Some of his happiest memories are of going skating with his late father, so he decides to do the Pari Roller, a bat-out-of-hell mass street-skate round the city. And during the skate he encounters something that doesn’t make sense…
Version 1
So I decided to kick off with Stephen on his way to the skate and having second thoughts:
Sitting on the Paris Metro with his skates on the floor between his feet, Stephen felt sick with apprehension.
He wished he’d never managed to convince himself that he could do this. As the train pulled in to Montparnasse he decided that he would stay on board. He could ride on a few stops, find something else to do, and avoid making a fool of himself.
Version 2
Well, that was dull-boring-dull. So the next draft tried to kick off with a bang: Stephen is actually on the skate:
The Pari Roller roared up the boulevard like a tidal wave. At its heart, Stephen Ruthyn skated hand-in-hand with terror.
It had sat beside him on the Metro, an almost physical presence, whispering to him that he would fail. He would fall. He would end up, humiliated and injured, in hospital.
It stood over him, sneering, as he fumbled to put on his skates. It chuckled as he stumbled to his feet. People were staring at him, it insisted. Laughing at him.
As the skate moved off, Stephen felt his terror pulling maliciously at him, causing him to collide with other skaters who elbowed him aside, cursing. Terror whispered that it was his friend, that it was trying to look out for him—
‘I can do this!’ And he pulled free, bent low and pushed hard. Muscle memory kicked in. Spaces opened up around him. He left terror behind and, picking up speed, felt the world shrink to fit him.
Version 3
Some beta feedback suggested that Stephen needed to be… well, less of a wimp. So I attempted to inject excitement and confidence:
Black tarmac, smooth beneath his feet. The roar of polyurethane wheels. A voice, screaming, ’Allez, allez!’
Go, go!
He was in Paris. Skating again. The Pari Roller.
I toyed with various ‘improvements’ to this for a long time, but it didn’t work: however much I tweaked, I was trying too hard. Stephen might be a happier, more confident bunny; but he remained a hazily-perceived presence, lost in the dense shrubbery of his own story.
Version 4
By now, panic was setting in. I threw the narrative into the first person present tense that had, I felt, served me so well in my first novel Gifted and its sequel Pariah:
It’s after midnight and I’m out on my inline skates, going like a rocket round the streets of Paris. Me and a couple of thousand other maniacs, all doing the Pari Roller—twenty kilometres à toute vitesse.
Top speed.
I feel great—better than I have for months—because when I’m skating, I’m not me. I’m too busy trying to stay alive to feel sorry for myself. I stop beating up on myself. I stop missing Dad.
I fiddled with that version for a long time, trying to get it to work. In the end I gave up and left it lying on its back with its paws in the air while I worked on Mortal, a further sequel to Gifted.
Version 5
Finally, about a year ago, I picked Those Who Wait up again and realised two things. First, the story had to be the default third person past tense: Stephen is a recessive, self-involved character who simply doesn’t earn first person present tense. Nor had I earned the in media res kick-off: the reader needed to know Stephen before the drama of the skate could generate any real value.
So I moved the start of the story back a couple of months, to his first arrival in Paris to live with an ageing, eccentric aunt whom he barely knows:
‘Oh, one thing I forgot to tell you: the apartment is haunted.’ Stephen’s aunt pushed the door. It resisted for a moment, then opened with a faint scraping sound. ‘So don’t be surprised if you see a small boy wandering about the place.’
From the landing, half-dead with exhaustion, Stephen peered past her. The hall stretched away, dim in the evening light filtering through the doors that opened off it, left and right. He saw shelves of books, stretching up to the elaborate plasterwork where the walls met the high ceiling. He saw more books stacked up in piles along the skirting boards. A wooden parquet floor. A table with an antique lamp.
‘Are you serious?’ He could almost feel the apartment holding its breath, waiting, hoping for him to enter.
That worked for me. By the time Stephen embarked upon the fateful Pari Roller I felt I had given readers a pretty good idea of who he was and what was at stake for him.
Version 6
In the end, however, I introduced a new, short first chapter: a sort of prologue that fell back upon the idea that had originally sparked Those Who Wait: my desire to write a creepy, old-fashioned sort of ghost story:
Drawn to the light, as all ghosts are, he would stand for hours in a thin finger of sunshine, letting it pierce his heart like a spear of burning gold, shuffling sideways an inch at a time as the earth turned; until the clouds gathered or night fell and he froze into a state of patient expectation.
He heard traffic pass in the street, the warning tones of a reversing truck, the helpless rage of an alarm. He was aware of the water circulating in the veins of the building. He listened to footsteps, the rumble of a wheeled suitcase, the rattle of the lift, music from the café on the corner.
He saw particles of dust dance in the air and settle along ledges, light fittings and skirting boards, and in the cracks and corners of the floors. He was aware of the infinitely slow bleeding of colour from the walls. He saw the drip of water leave a widening brown stain on the enamel of the bath.
He was pure expectation. He was waiting for the day when the lift gate would crash open, the shuffle of footsteps would halt purposefully outside the door, and a key would turn in the lock—
Those Who Wait is available on Amazon as a paperback, or on Kindle
Donald Hounam 