The one amazing thing that helped me understand story.

And find a way to construct a map that helped me get to there

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John Irving said he never started any novel without knowing the final sentence of it. That kind of blows my mind. I certainly don’t know the last sentence of a new piece of work, but these days I have a pretty good idea what happens when I get there. Of where I want the novel or play to finish. I have a map and I have got a rough journey of how to get to the destination. But the stuff in between is where it all gets a little tricky.

One thing I used to find when a director, producer or editor was giving me notes or asking for a pitch, was that they spoke in a language that didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t know what turning points were. I mean, I knew what they were, but not how to do them. The inciting incident, easy for them to say. Narrative, character motivation. Out there it looked simple as bricks and mortar, but inside I was dealing with blood, guts and heart. The language often used by those ‘in the business’, doesn’t feel instinctive or connected to the process of writing that I was doing on the inside.

Language matters to writers, and I had to find a way to articulate the process of storytelling in terms I could understand. I was writing theatre and audio at the time and I realised there was one thing that kept showing up in my work, in language and narrative, that almost seemed to be stalking me.

So this is the question I figure that helped me break through and start to understand how stories work.

What is the ultimate silence buried in the heart of your story and what

would it take to unearth it?

Silence has always been a huge thing for me. It bugged my words, ate my radio plays, demanded presence in my stage-plays.

It can mean many things in trying to tell story.

It can be the big lie in the guts of your novel. It can be something unknown at the beginning that causes a rupture, buried deep but demanding to rise to the surface. It can be a secret, an absence that makes itself present. So as writers, if we can get a sense of what that buried silence is, then we have the capacity to create a road map that will help us navigate the story we are trying to tell.

For Luke Skywalker in A New Hope, the buried silence is initially the lie and hidden secret about his father, who Luke believes to be a hero killed by Darth Vader. So the culmination of the first movie is Luke destroying the Death Star, but a missed confrontation with Vader. In the Empire Strikes Back, the discovery that Darth Vader is his dad is the unearthing silence that emerges and then shapes the man he becomes in Return of the Jedi as he accepts the truth of the silence and not only confronts Vader, but forgives him.

In the Devil Wears Prada, the buried silence (or big lie) is Andy’s denied ambition. Her snobbery about interning at Runway magazine, her desire to be a ‘proper’ journalist. As the movie proceeds, the silence of ambition unravels and comes back to bite her, as she gets ensnared into the world, the glamour, the cut-throat and shreds her friends, ultimately challenged by Miranda at the end of the film, that they are in fact the same ruthless cold-hearted beast. That silence of ambition takes the whole film to be fully known, and at the end Andy both accepts and denies it, ultimately she transcends the silence as she finds the strength to walk away.

The brilliant thing about buried silences is that they aren’t static. They are always in motion and will drive your narrative. Silence is always evolving. The more I was aware of it the more potent it becames. The propulsion of the narrative would be the journey of allowing that silence to emerge in minutiae. Once I landed what the buried silence was, I began to have the capacity to pinpoint unearthing events on my map which would help me arrive at the destination.

A silence can play in many ways, and there could be multiple other silences that need to surface in the process of unearthing the core that lies beneath everything.

I like to think of the buried silence as an orca, existing at depth in the ocean, knowing it will surface. At the start, it hints at its presence, will play with its prey in shallow waters, and then vanish. Dive deep, it hides, denies its existence, except for the undulations. A buried silence always threatens emergence, can be terrifying to contemplate which heightens the tension (that’s why there’s always great reversals and denials in the third part), but ultimately the movement to the surface is the end game when the orca takes a leap out of the water and reveals itself fully.

I chose the orca because it is not benign. It is as deadly as silences can be.

The emergent silence becomes the movement of the novel, and must rise towards the surface, even if it is re-buried, denied, set aside multiple times in the progression of the story, ultimately it must be revealed. If you are writing crime, the silence is what the murder is wrapped up in and all the lies that conceal that. Unmasking it is a progression of unpicking what happened, until the silence is forced to speak.

Emergent silences can be about the lies our characters tell themselves. I write character-driven story, so silences can be used ultimately to act as mirrors which make the protagonists confront truth about themselves. So if the silence is some kind of lie or denial, those story movements can hopefully detonate into really profound arcs of self revelation.

I think of Lizzie in Pride and Prejudice. Her journey is in simple terms a realisation that she was wrong about Darcy. Her buried silence is that of pride; initially seemingly justified. But the arc of the novel, through her sisters disastrous experiences, challenges Lizzie's bias, confirms it, then allows it to ripple beneath the surface, be rediscovered, proved to be wrong and ultimately be fully transformed into something called love.

Or Winston in 1984. He is never really completely conscious of the buried silence that unfurls in and around him. What he believes at the beginning is he is an activist trying to stand up to Big Brother and is ultimately overcome. But that is not the emergent silence. What George Orwell knows, and makes us realise as the novel concludes, is that Winston was never an activist, he was always just fodder to Big Brother. That is the emergent silence of a master-writer who is totally in control of his material, that Winston Smith could never win.

Inspired by that kind of storytelling leads me to deeper questions about what I might actually want my novel to be about. What silences do I want to bury and then dig up, and what might that say about this world I find myself in?

How do I want the emergent silence to change my characters?

Where do I want to take them, what do I want to do to them and who do I want them to be by the end?

Do they learn something, or refuse change (those characters are exciting too). What are the events that I will lay before them to bring about these ultimate transformations?

I was watching Andrew Davies’ extraordinary TV adaptation of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ recently. I couldn’t help noticing how Tolstoy makes all his people ultimately look in the mirror and realise they are not who they think they are. The emergent silences are the embodied immorality, pride and hatefulness which they all refuse to see at the beginning, going along their merry way. But by the end Tolstoy forces each one of them to confront what they are, often through terrible lingering deaths. Punishment.

One of my writing obsessions at the moment is the difference between a relationship that is transactional and one that is real. My new novel, currently in first draft, exposes one of the character’s transactional ‘use’ of the protagonist, not once but twice in the novel. But at the end he is forced to face up to the consequences of his incapacity to think about anything but himself, and therefore realises he has lost the greatest love of his life. It is only in the final moments that he understands how much he loved her.

Emergent silences can unravel characters, layer by layer.

They can also become journeys out of silence, a fought battle against silencing.

Jane Eyre, by the end of the book, has made a journey that leaves behind a constrained life of service and forced muteness, to be fully realized as someone who can live a freely articulated and empowered life. The points in between are her struggles to break surface and breathe, and society’s denial and submersion of her freedoms over and over. The same can be said of Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale. Each progression, push-back, denial creates in Jane

and Offred more desire, determination and depth of character to be free. To speak. To be autonomous, not invisible.

I guess in the end, these are the stories I am writing. From silence to speaking. From invisible to presence. I call it the unsilence. Where the unspoken, the unsayable, the stories that are untold, get to speak. Claw their way to the surface. Get to change the world.

Roar.