The Space Between Time

Curveball time! Why yes, it's not a post from me, but a guest blog post from Charlie Laidlaw, author of Love Potions and Other Calamities, The Things We Learn When We're Dead and his upcoming novel The Space Between Time. 

Now, this is a little hard to explain so I hope Charlie's guest post about what inspired him to write this will help and explain better but let me try...

Emma Rossini appears to be the luckiest girl in the world. Daughter of a beautiful and loving mother, her father one of the most famous film actors and her grandfather an eccentric yet obscure astrophysicist.

But Emma's life begins to unravel after several horrible events... And it's here, in this darkest moment, her psychiatrist suggest writing a memoir of her life, in the hope it makes her understand and comes to terms with everything that has happened...

I know, this is a bit of a curve ball for the Pewter Wolf, but I was intrigued and seeing as I fancy mixing things up this year on the blog, reading and posting wise...

Before I hand you over to Charlie, I want to thank you for finding time to write this post! If you want to say hi to him, check out his website - charlielaidlawauthor.com - or tweet him at @claidlawauthor. Plus, if you want more info on The Space Between Time, you can check out either Accent Press.

Now, over to Charlie!

The inspiration for my first book, The Things We Learn When We’re Dead, came to me completely unexpectedly on a train from Edinburgh to London.

It was an apt place to have inspiration because Edinburgh is the only city in the world to have named its main railway station after a book.

It’s a book about memory and how it shapes who we are.  It asks the question: if we could remember our pasts in a slightly different way, would we be changed in any way.

But there was no such flash of inspiration for my current book, The Space Between Time.  It only gradually morphed like a slow-growing jellyfish into its final form. 

But, looking at it objectively, some of the central ideas came from my first book because it too looks at memory, but from a different perspective.  The question it asks is: what if we came to realise that our feelings for those closest to us were false?

The premise for the book is simple enough.  It tells the story of a young woman growing up in Scotland.  She loves her mother and grows to hate her father.

But she has no particular reason to dote on her mother, and no particular reason to loathe her father.  Truth and false memory have become entangled, and the book is all about how she painfully comes to understand her past and herself.

But unlike my first book, there was no one moment of inspiration.  Rather, the book went down several dead-ends before I understood the characters, what drove them and, therefore, how the story should flow.

That’s the thing about inspiration.  It only ever comes in bite-sized chunks.  The trick is to grasp that first idea and then, over and over, to ask what happens next.  

Once you have good characters, and can hear in your head how they speak, and understand what they would do in any given situation, stories become much easier to write!