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A Writer's Journey - An exercise in prose. • Sam Hawksmoor Whatever happened to Genie Magee? My year began just like yours in January. I was in Miami. I love to write in a sunbeam, my mood and enthusiasm for making progress rises exponentially. I was finishing up The Restoration of Ami which is a road trip story set in the USA. I had this sudden idea that I’d go back to my first Hawksmoor novel The Repossession of Genie Magee. I’d put Genie through so much in her young life it was a wonder she survived at all. Mental health issues for Gen Z are all the rage and I got to thinking about what Genie would be like now 13 years on. She’d be around thirty now. Would she even be alive? Genie was the first ever human to survive teleportation – as did a few others thanks to her, not that many survived long. What would the long-term effects be on her health or mental state?  It was, for me at least an interesting experiment in interrogating a character I’d created. So, following the assumption she was still alive I wrote a whole new story. It begins with her surviving a car crash and losing her memory. Recovering that memory and then experiencing all the trauma all over again. It might just finish her off. Who knows? She’s tough but is she that tough? How did she deal with it. How did the sassy girl Renée cope and what happened to Rian, Genie's young lover. I finished it in July and then put it to one side so I can read it through later and have fresh critical eyes on the story. But publish it? Would there be any readers at all for a belated sequel. All the teen readers would also be in their late twenties now. The three books in the series are still in print in Turkey but I doubt they’d buy another as it would now appeal to a different demographic. So, have I wasted my time?  Perhaps. But I have learned something along the way about Genie and the other characters, especially Renée. I don’t know about you, but I often think about the characters in the novels I read and how they cope with PTSD after all the terrible things that happen to them. I mean Bourne, he must be totally traumatized. Any character in a Leigh Bardugo novel. I remember once trying to persuade a publisher in New York to let me write a Bond novel set when he was eighty and trying to cope with his own mental issues and possible alcoholism.  They said no, of course.  You don’t mess with the brand. Which is why characters in the ‘funnies’ never age, I guess. And Batman gets forever reinvented. No one wants to see those characters with diminished faculties or frailties. * A novel 25 years in the making By chance I was looking for a story I wrote some time ago when I found a file I thought I had lost forever.  In 2000 I was living in Vancouver and enjoying life there. In fact, one of the happiest periods of my life as I took a year off from teaching. I began writing a book set in Spain – influenced by events I had experience when staying in Jerez and Seville the year before. I witnessed a fatal shooting. I offered to give an eye witness report to the local cops, but none spoke English and I spoke no Spanish and they weren't interested. Believe it or not this was not the first time I had witnessed a murder; the other time was in Brooklyn. Long before mobile phones, I remember running down the hill to the coffee shop near Brooklyn Bridge where cops would stop to have coffee. Sure enough they pointed out 'politely' that they were on a break. All those scenes you see in the movies where cops are keen to take witness statements … forget it. I went back home, an ambulance had arrived at the building site where the altercation had taken place and that was that. Just another statistic. So, I read the story I had written about a women fleeing her abusive husband in London and arriving in Jerez to study Flamenco dancing and decided I still liked it. Of course, it was 2000. We’re still in the era of Nokia or Samsung flip phones. People write letters. Still talk to each other and the smart phone is a distant dream. Do I keep it in 2000 or move it up to the present day.  I wrestled with that for a while and decided to update it. I moved the story on some and then hit the 40,000-word mark. The dreaded middle where the story is supposed to change direction. Suddenly I remembered why I had stopped writing it. My main character has to flee but in doing so leaves all the interesting characters behind. I must have sensed that when I stopped writing. I was writing for Elle Décor in New York at the time so was busy with some feature articles, but I had also had to apply for teaching jobs as my savings wouldn’t last forever. Whatever it was, the novel got filed and then lost. So now it is almost December 2024. I have spent almost a year writing a book there is probably no market for and six months working on a book that runs out of steam in the middle. I used to teach my students that plotting a story out before you write it is very useful and they all disagreed with this method but clearly it helps, if you go down a dead end, you can always read the notes and back up and start off in another direction.  Hitchcock mapped out every scene before he shot a single frame. He knew what he was doing. Even if you stop to embellish a scene to add colour, you know exactly where it’s heading next. It’s my bad that I only seem to have plotted half a novel. Luckily I remembered my astonishment when the author Patrick Ness came to visit my students at Portsmouth University. He told them that "I always write the last line first." I was surprised, as surely the pleasure in writing a novel is discovering all the twists and turns that happen to characters on the way. But faced with a soggy middle it's worth a try. So I thought long and hard about it and finally knew what the last page would be, if not the exact line. So now all I had to do was work my way back to the middle in reverse order. It sounds crazy but it may have worked. The novel is going to be shorter than I intended but at least it now has a definitive ending. Backfilling means you can work on scenes that you know are going to happen and knit them together later. Slowly but surely it all falls into place. Well I hope it does. One day when I finally finish it I'll read it back and see if it works. Only been 25 years so far ... © Sam Hawksmoor December 2024 Author of Mission Longshot and other stories - download or order the print version