Order of Information, by Elizabeth Kay

The order in which you present information in a book is very important. If you delay including something we need to know we’re going to spend too much time trying to work out what’s going on, which is when we lose touch with the story as we’re no longer concentrating. Most of us have read books where we’ve suddenly been surprised by something – the gender of the narrator, their appearance, their age perhaps. This can mean completely re-evaluating what we’ve read before, and we may end up no longer trusting the author to tell us what’s necessary which may be when we stop reading. When we know the gender of the author we tend to assume their narrator is the same gender  too, unless we’re given a pointer. I have written as a man several times, and it’s often important to establish this fact right at the start, otherwise the plot won’t make sense. This is the beginning of my short story Cassie, which was one of the winners of the Canongate prize when I needed to flag up the gender of my narrator early on, and as unobtrusively as possible:

 She’s playing now. I watch her, the way her dark head tilts as she talks to her farm animals, telling them what they’re doing as she shuffles them across the floor. I did wonder whether to get her the plastic models; they’re more realistic. But in the end I decided against it – the pre-war lead ones are perfectly adequate – better in some ways. I know their contours, the solid feel they have in the palm of your hand. I owned a set of them when I was a boy.

This doesn’t mean that you need to know everything yourself when you write it. I like to use an example from one of my own books to illustrate this. In Backto the Divide our hero, Felix, is looking for a matchbox containing a marble snail in a cave where there’s a lot of junk. At the time, I thought there might be something useful there but I had no need for anything. So I wrote: Felix finds X, picks it up and puts it in his pocket. I could always remove this strand after I’d finished if I couldn’t think of any use for it, and you may well have come across books where this wasn’t addressed and you’re left wondering – whatever happened to so-and-so? But later on I did need something to act as a bribe, so I changed it to this:

 Another chalice, a belt studded with bronze stars, a little book… He picked it up. It was an instruction manual for something called a storm-oracle. He let it drop. A splintered wooden sheath for a scythe, a shoe; something that resembled a miniature crystal ball, with a brass band round the middle. There was some lettering on it, although most of it had worn away. A, C, L, E… The last part of the word oracle, maybe? He put it in his pocket, and went back for the booklet. He could study it later; anything involving magical theory would be interesting.

 And this was the incident that required it. Scavenjit is a harpy-like creature who is quite likely to eat the griffin chick Fuzzy, who is under Felix’s protection:

“What are your plans for the rest of the day?” he asked casually.

    “Breakfast,” said Scavenjit. “Then lunch. And after that, dinner.”

This didn’t sound terribly promising. “Is that all you do, then?” he asked. “Eat? Don’t you have any hobbies or anything?”

“Meteorology,” said Scavenjit unexpectedly.

“Weather? You’re interested in predicting the weather?”

“What’s wrong with that? We love storms, we carrionwings do. The one last night was a cracker. There’s not much that beats flying around in a good thunderstorm, shrieking. If we knew in advance when we were going to get a howling gale we could make preparations.”

“What sort of preparations?” asked Felix, intrigued.

“Oh, a bit of flocking and convening. It’s much more fun if there’s lots of you.”

So the noise last night wasn’t just the wind, thought Felix. The carrionwings were out and about in it, having a party. He suddenly remembered the storm-oracle in his pocket. It was perfect; he couldn’t have found anything better if he’d tried. He took it out, and cupped it in his hands. The transparent crystal clouded immediately this time – but it stayed yellow. “Might get a bit overcast later,” said Felix, making an educated guess, “but there won’t be another storm tonight.”

Scavenjit looked at him. “That’s not one of them storm-oracles, is it?” she asked.

Felix nodded.

The carrionwing’s craggy old face was suddenly suffused with longing.

“If you look after Fuzzy for me while I enter the castle,” said Felix, “you can have it. After I get back, naturally.”

 Things are so different today, when you can move pieces of information around digitally. When I started writing there were no computers. It was cut-and-paste, quite literally, pages with sections cut out from somewhere else, and stuck in with Sellotape. Darting back and forth between different timelines and different characters didn’t happen so frequently, either. It was much harder to keep track of what you were doing. In the words of Lewis Carroll, you started at the beginning, went on to the end, and then stopped. In many way, I think it was better. Mixing things up because it looks trendy and clever can be really off-putting for the reader, because it makes them work harder. If you’re doing something unconventional, it needs to be for a reason. Not because everyone else seems to be doing it.