Background to Things He Never Knew
This is not going to be a normal blog post for me today. Frivolity and accounts of my sometimes bewildering life will go out of the window, and self-imposed structure will replace it. The intention behind this essay-style entry is to give you an idea of the background to Things He Never Knew and to help you understand the motivation of my characters to do what they did. And this is relevant whether you have read the book or whether you haven’t. Plus I spent the two A-Level years of my life doing 45 minute timed essays at least three times a week on such riveting subjects as Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Elizabeth I’s foreign policy, Calvinism, Othello, The Tempest, Chaucer and Wilfrid Owen. Therefore I must make the most of any residual skills – though I will not be restricting myself to 45 minutes by any stretch of the imagination.
Imagination however, is a key word. Because it’s important to remember from the start that these people are entirely fictional. I know that I’ve already made this point about Steph, because I was forced to, but they are not real, I have conjured and created them from the depths of my mind. That said, they are made up of real people. Their experiences, emotions, decisions, desires and motivations are all very real ones. There is nothing in Things He Never Knew that is impractical, implausible or unbelievable. In fact I would go so far as to say that the exact situation that I describe in the book has happened and is happening out there right now. But I digress.
My main characters are called Steph and Theo Hammond. They met at school when they were very young. They lived a typical, slightly-incestuous, village life in their early days where everyone knows everyone else and what everyone else is getting up to. It was a closeted environment with little outside interference and little to disturb the day to day ordinariness of life. It was probably much like my own early life, except that I left the village where I lived to go to school half an hour away in a much bigger town. Steph and Theo did not, they lived, played and were educated in the same place. And this inevitably bred in them a naivety about the Real World. And a restlessness to see what else life could offer them which in turn leads to slight recklessness. This would have been subconscious, they were not seeking opportunities to stretch boundaries, but yet when they make the decision to leave their village, the lack of life experience afforded to them is undoubtedly a factor. Both in a curious sense, and in an immature sense. Steph and Theo would have been better to have done some planning, made some realistic plans and worked out what it was that they wanted before endeavouring to find it. It is a difficult situation which prompts their departure from the village and one which they don’t handle very well and thus end up alienating a very close friend of their, called Ed, whom they also met when they were very young. Ed is a bit of a strange character; quite aloof and alone he struggles to make friends easily and relies heavily on both Steph and Theo in this sense, developing a strong attachment to the former which he imagines to be love. Of course it isn’t, but there is no way that Ed can understand this at such a young age. Taking this into account, it is easy to see why Ed is so hurt and upset when Steph and Theo essentially abandon him. He can’t understand why they have done it, nor why they should want to, and this has a lasting impact upon him, ultimately changing him fundamentally as a person. He harbours a deep grudge and lasting resentment, though this last stands him in good stead so far as determination towards his career goes.
The life-altering mistake that Steph makes is dual-fold. It results from a piece of late-night stupidity and then from overwhelming fear and shock. And probably her biggest problem is that once she makes this particular mistake, it is irreversible. Of course she could stand up at any point over the next ten years and admit to it, but the human psyche doesn’t work like that. In one of the chapters I describe Steph as thinking very much like a child; with the time that passes from the crime, the assumption is made that so must the danger of being discovered too. However this is not the case. What Steph has managed to do, and do very well, is convince herself that if she isn’t looking at her mistake – metaphorically speaking – then it will not be looking at her, and thus she can avoid the consequences. This is a very childlike and naïve attitude, and one which she is able to have because of the sheltered life she has led. Steph has gone from village childhood into cosseted adulthood. Theo is lucky enough to have been extremely swift at climbing his career ladder and carving out a privileged life for them all. They have a large and expensively decorated house, the twins attend a private school and they have all the accoutrements of wealth; as well as their loving marriage and happy, healthy children. In other words they have everything, or so it appears to the outsider. The point of the whole story is that it is possible to appear to have everything and yet be missing some of the crucial underpinning to life. Steph has personal ambitions which she has not properly acknowledged, let alone achieved, because before she can do that, she must deal with the fact that her entire life is based on and wrapped in a tissue of deceit. There are many things that could and should be happening in Steph’s life, but because she is trapped in this vortex of lies she can’t progress any of them. And this is something which Theo fails to understand. Necessarily protected from the truth, he can’t understand why Steph behaves as she does. And the one criticism that we can level at Theo is that he doesn’t think as deeply as he might about Steph’s behaviour, nor afford her the luxury of being able to see that something must be very wrong for her to act as she does. He deals with his wife in a very shallow way. He doesn’t mean to, but their lives have knitted together in such a way as to make him believe that nothing can possibly be wrong and he resents it enormously when Steph refuses to give him what he wants.
In some ways it is a sad story, and yet I was careful to write through exactly what my characters were experiencing. I dislike it when authors ‘bookend’ the traumatic main event of a book, i.e. they devote chapters and chapters leading up to whatever it is that’s going to happen and just as the climactic point of the story is reached, they drop the narration and pick it up again on the other side, once the event has happened so we see the aftermath but not the actual event. I didn’t want this for Things He Never Knew, I wanted my readers to have to go through every horrible emotion that Steph and Theo do because it is only then that you can understand them properly. And it makes a better book in my opinion. It’s harder to write but ultimately you craft a better and more satisfying story.
So that’s it. That’s the bare bones of my thinking behind Things He Never Knew, ahead of making the first chapter available to read tomorrow online. And I tell you what, it was a darn sight more interesting and easier to write than essays about Henry VIII and the Nuns Priests Tale.
That was obviously where I went wrong at A-Level, I clearly should have studied my own work.
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