A Writer's Tale

But there are always fresh approaches.

I wanted to give it a shot.

Instead of being marooned when a storm destroys their ship, my group is already ashore, picnicking on an island when their yacht blows up. Within a few hours after that, one of the castaways is found hanged.

I employed a special technique in the writing of Island.

The whole story is told by a young castaway who is keeping a journal. We see the entire adventure through his eyes.

What makes this different from the usual first-person narrative (such as I used in Savage) is that the writer of the journal is telling the story as it happens. And the writing of the journal becomes part of the story.

Most first-person novels seem to have been written years after the events of the story occurred. We usually don’t know what has prompted the narrator to tell his or her story.

The telling seems unrelated to the actual events of the story. And it is generally obvious from the start that the narrator survived to tell the tale.

Not so with Island.

We know why Rupert is keeping the journal. We know when he is making entries in it.

We know where the journal is at all times during the course of the novel. But we never know what may happen next or whether Rupert will even by alive to finish the story.

Because he is writing the journal as he goes along, anything can happen.

The technique opened up a lot of new ways to play with the story, new ways to surprise myself and my readers.

Rupert’s journal was actually a variation and expansion of the tape recorder technique that I used in the “Simon Says” sections of Endless Night. I simply changed the tape recorder to a written journal…  then took the possibilities as far as I could.

With Island, I developed no plot outline. It is a fairly straight-forward story, all of it told from Rupert’s point of view. I put together a group of characters who seemed colorful, placed them on the island, blew up their boat, then just let the plot unfold in the ways that seemed most natural.

This is not to suggest that I allowed chaos to rule the story.

Every story has its own integral logic.

One of the major tricks, in writing, is to discover the natural logic that is inherent in a story’s basic situation, then release it. Develop it. Explore it. Exploit it.

Let’s take Island as an example.

The situation is this this: a small group of people, vacationing in the Bahamas, are having a picnic on an apparently deserted island when their yacht blows up.

What happens next?

Do they sing “Deck the Halls”? Do they toss around a Frisbee for a while? Do they split up to go bird watching?

Of course not.

Not unless they’re nuts.

What would people with common sense do?

Easy. They would take their dingy out to the site of the explosion and try to recover any items that might prove useful for their survival. Such as food, utensils, weapons, clothing…

This almost has to be done first, before the salvageable items are washed away, eaten by fish, or otherwise lost to the sea.

What next?

After salvaging everything useful from the wreckage, any reasonable person would probably embark on a limited exploration of the island looking for a source of fresh water, signs of civilization, and generally taking note of any nearby resources or hazards.

And so on.

To a large extent, the story is writing itself, telling the writer what should happen next. Or at least giving him a limited selection of reasonable alternatives, As new elements are added to the story (such as a member of the castaway group being murdered in the middle of the night), the situation changes. And the new situation gives the writer certain ways he has to go if he wants to tell the story correctly.

If one of your castaways gets killed, what naturally follows?

Shock. An investigation into the cause of the death. Disposal of the body. Maybe a funeral. Discussions about who might’ve done the deed and how to keep the rest of the group safe. A gathering of weapons for self-defense. Cautions against going anywhere alone. A buddy system for leaving the camp to get firewood, relieve oneself, etc. Guards to be posted overnight. And so on.

These are matters that almost have to be dealt with, because they would naturally come up if ordinary people are marooned and one of their number is murdered.

Every good author, given those circumstances, would feel compelled to write about the shock of discovering the death, the preliminary investigation, the disposal of the body, etc.

In certain fundamental ways, their stories would be the same. Because the story itself demands to go in certain directions.

In other fundamental ways, however, the stories would be very different from each other.