How to Start Writing Your Novel

Malcolm Ross-Macdonald asserts the moral right

to be identified as the author of this work

ISBN: 9781311847614

Copyright © 2015 Malcolm Ross-Macdonald

Published by Smashwords

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior written permission from the author or a licence permitting restricted copying.

Contact details at www.malcolmmacdonald.org

Introduction

If you're looking for rules, stop right now. There are no rules. But there are well known and easily grasped principles that have produced highly readable fiction for the past several thousand years. The first is that a novel is best when it's about one or more people. Even if it's about an animal, it must be humanised to some extent – given thoughts, perceptions, ambitions, likes and dislikes …. And that's not because everyone loves an anthropomorph. It's much more basic than that. It is because those are the qualities that make for successful fiction.

The second principle is that there should be a conflict of some kind at the heart of it all … driving it forward. A novel giving the life-story of a blameless young woman who lives to be a hundred and is sweetness and light from first page to last would not generate much of a waiting list at the local library. But (you may now be thinking) your novel is nothing like that. Its 900-odd pages will be filled with brilliant existential insights into the human condition, amusing wordplay, amazing aperçus, and a 60,000-word vocabulary, so there is no real need for anything so trite, so banal as a genuine conflict. Right? Well, if that's so, I'm afraid you are writing a literary novel – and this book cannot help you.

So … in a genuine novel the conflict is central. It can be impersonal-and-external – an obsessive desire to climb an impossible mountain; a quest to find the Holy Grail. Or personal-and-external – the head of department is never going to promote me … my elder brother will live to a hundred and I'll never inherit; the bureaucracy … church … army … mafia are slowly killing me. Or personal-and-internal: a woman may fight an injustice for 300 pages but then abandon the chance of victory because as well as nailing the culprit it might cause the ruin of a dozen blameless people; an innocent person may accept disgrace rather than see the family / regiment / school dishonoured. Spin a tale around anything resembling these conflicts and you'll stand a good chance of sales.

The central conflict can even seem to be impossible, too. The murder-in-a-locked-room mystery has long been a staple teaser of whodunnit stories. And (to inject a modest note in keeping with the rest of this book) I myself am writing a modern thriller in which the heroine discovers a way of robbing any bank or corporation in the world (including the Bank of England), using the proceeds, and then putting it all back again, to the last penny, without the owner bank knowing it – or even being able to detect it. (And don't tell me that hasn't pricked your interest.)

The third principle is that the solution to the conflict or dilemma cannot be a cop-out: … and then he woke up. It had all been a dream! Or: Fortunately he won the lotto the very next week and the entire project was saved!. In the trade we call this a deus ex machina and we look down on it because it is Just Too Easy. However, to prove what I said about no absolute rules … John Gay gets away with it in The Beggar's Opera when his popular hero MacHeath is about to be hanged. Gay arranges for the notional author of the story to come on stage and rewrite the ending to reprieve Macheath and delight the audience. But Gay was a genius and I am not … and nor, most likely, are you.

There are other principles but that's enough for a start; we'll meet the rest as we go along. Obviously, the reason for wanting conflict is to raise the tension and force us to read on to see how our hero/ine wins or, if you're writing a polemical novel against injustice, loses (and makes you angry enough to Do Something about it).

The easiest way to get any point across is to use actual examples. I could, for instance, take thirty-odd first chapters from novels down the ages – from Robinson Crusoe, say, to the latest literary sensation; but, even if you are now a teenager, you would probably be dead before I had acquired all the copyright permissions, negotiated the royalty share, and cleared my interpretations with the original authors – who, besides, would make a much better fist of explaining their own works. It is far better for me to dissect my own work. I can still more-or-less recall: what conflict(s) I wanted to dominate the story and drive it forward … what sort of characters I needed in order to make that conflict as sharp and meaningful as possible … and why I chose to start it with these or those precise words.

I have been writing, publishing, and living off fiction since my first novel was published in 1962. The latest came out in 2008. In those forty-six years I had 59 books published by 10 international publishers (not counting translations). Thirty-one of them were historical novels set mainly in Victorian and Edwardian times with a few outliers in the 18th Century and the first half of the 20th. For most of them I had first to think of a central dilemma and then what sort of character (it was a woman in all but three of the stories) would have to cope with it. For the remaining few, his or her character came to me first and I had to devise a challenge that would provide the most exciting story without stretching the reader's credulity. But in all cases those two elements – a character plus a dilemma – had to be present before I wrote or typed Chapter One at the head of a blank page.

That first-line thing

Before moving on to the actual examples … a word about that all-important first line. Here are some historic greats. As you read each one, ask what it hints at … what it promises about the story that is to follow:

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (1813): It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

[Social prejudice ... money ... marriage. How can that possibly fail?]

Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (1878): All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

[This is extraordinary since it is the exact opposite of a truth that is universally acknowledged: No two happy families are ever alike … all unhappy families are! You have to read on.]

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

[Cold ... and 13, the number of doom. Do you expect a happy ending?]

J.D Salinger: The Catcher In The Rye (1951): If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

[The speaker of these lines, Holden Caulfield, then spends the rest of the book doing exactly what he here denies. Teenagers, eh? Can we ever understand them?]

Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis (1915): As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

[See my earlier remarks about having an impossible central conflict.]

J.M. Barrie: Peter Pan (1911): All children, except one, grow up.

[The awkward mixture of general statement with a particular exception … the feeling that present and past tenses jostle uneasily here … is the magic that makes us read on.]

Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady (1880): Under certain circumstance there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

[James was famous/notorious for never using one word where four would do – so you can't complain you weren't warned from the very start.]

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (1955): Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

[Nabokov is saying, You know what this story is all about – but don't expect it to be standard pulp-fiction erotica!]

Stephen Crane: The Red Badge Of Courage (1895): The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

[It often helps to think of your novel as a movie and ask yourself, How would I shoot the opening scene? Stephen Crane's genius was to realize that long before narrative movies were invented.]

Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man And The Sea (1952): He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

[You can't get more terse than that – but Hemingway was the master of terse. Note that particularized ‘Gulf Stream,’ which is vast and ever-moving – not a generalized ‘ocean,’ which is vast but static.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: Heat and Dust – Booker Prize 1975: Shortly after Olivia went away with the Nawab, Beth Crawford returned from Simla. This was in September, 1923. Beth had to go down to Bombay to meet the boat on which her sister Tessie was arriving. Tessie was coming out to spend the cold season with the Crawfords. They had arranged all sorts of visits and expeditions for her, but she stayed mostly in Satipur because of Douglas. They went riding together and played croquet and tennis and she did her best to be good company for him. Not that he had much free time, for he kept himself as busy as ever in the district. He worked like a Trojan and never ceased to be calm and controlled, so that he was very much esteemed both by his colleagues and by the Indians. He was upright and just. Tessie stayed through that cold season, and through the next one as well, and then she sailed for home. A year later Douglas had his home leave and they met again in England. By the time his divorce came through, they were ready to get married. She went out to join him in India and, like her sister Beth, she led a full and happy life there. In course of time she became my grandmother – but of course by then everyone was back in England.

[If this turns you on (and I know it takes all sorts to make a world) I'd respectfully suggest that you don't read any further.]

The World from Rough Stones – 1974

Here's how freelance writing works. One of my commissions around 1970 was directly from the legendary Peter Glemser, head of Reader's Digest Books Division. He wanted to fly a literary kite – a British version of the very successful U.S. magazine American Heritage, which was published six times a year in hardback editions and free of advertising. He did not want it to look like the cool, fact-oriented Reader's Digest Books but something more showy, lush, and ornate … a mixture of one-time articles and regular series. And he hired me to stay well away from the Reader's Digest office and plan the various sections of the book in secret. One of the sections I proposed was provisionally titled Everyman's Diary – excerpts from imaginary diaries of ordinary men, women, and children that, decade by decade, would chronicle aspects of their everyday lives, thoughts, hopes, and fears. It would start with Neanderthal Man and end around the time of the Moon landings – well, my brief was to think big.

One sample excerpt was based on a history of the Manchester—Liverpool Railway I happened to own – specifically, the building of the Summit Tunnel on that line. Reverting to the BBC drama's Try us! – I thought that might make an interesting backdrop to the opening episode of what I hoped would become a fifteen-part saga spanning the whole Victorian age from around 1840 to 1900; the book described how careless the railway navvies were with gunpowder – and, obviously, an explosion would make a grand addition to the first episode. All I needed to add was a little human intrigue along these lines:

The explosion is maybe not as accidental as it seems. It forces the main contractor for the tunnel into bankruptcy and allows one of the foremen – a charismatic, larger than life hunk of manhood – to take over the contract and start on an upward journey that will take him and his large Victorian family to untold wealth and power. His wife will be our heroine. In fact, she will be the heroine – the central character – because I think that a woman facing adversity, intolerance, belittling, prejudice, and so on is far more interesting than a man's struggle against … a mountain, a glacier, a ruthless baddy, an unjust accusation, or a White Whale. So there was the first skeleton of a plot.

Time for names: John Stevenson is the foreman who may or may not have engineered the explosion; Nora, who will marry him, is a penniless girl with plenty of fighting spirit and … yes! … let's say she has a wonderful head for figures. That gives us two strong, unconventional Victorians so let's also have two very conventional ones: Walter Thornton and Arabella, his betrothed; she is completely ignorant of sex while he has acquired all his knowledge between the sheets of a brothel – indeed, of several hundred brothels. Let's appoint him the chief engineer on the Summit Tunnel contract and make sure the sparks will fly. With this cast as my nucleus I wrote the first four 90-minute plays of what I hope would expand to 10 or more.

Episode One: Nora, at the end of her tether and broke, is tending her father's grave before tramping onward from Manchester to Leeds. Summit Tunnel is just a mile away. Sex-starved Walter sees her vanish into the abandoned graveyard, runs hot and horny to join her, offers her two shillings for a quick one. The deed is done … night draws on … where to sleep? He directs her to John Stevenson's cabin. We hear a massive explosion in the tunnel as she arrives. She helps in the firefight and the rescue. John is in charge of everything. She gets a night's lodging with him but he must spend it on calculations that will let him bid for the contract while the railway directors are still reeling in shock. By dawn he knows Nora's the only one for him, and not just for her calculating skill.

You'll have to imagine the remaining episodes because this is a book about beginnings. I sent all four episodes in to the BBC and within a month … nothing happened. Two months … nothing went on happening. This looked good! They were obviously having to refer the idea upward, trying to get authority to commission all 18 episodes! Perhaps I'd even have to endure lunch with the Director General himself! At three months I broke. (And probably was broke, too.) I called them and was told they had never done four linked plays before … weren't even sure what to call them. (Quartet? I wondered.) Would I consider cutting it to a trilogy?

The cutting took less than half an hour but the decision still stretched out a further month. My agent said, Why not make it a novel? The Beeb will certainly take it then.

So I did. And so did they. All three episodes were broadcast to coincide with the novel's first publication in 1974.

But – and here we come to an important difference between drama and printed fiction. What I realized on that train journey, the day after I thought the novel was finished, was that I could not possibly start with Nora being bedded on a tombstone by Walter; I would first have to show how desperate she was … how she had to force herself into doing such a thing. So I had to add what one might call a prequel chapter in which her life is on the line and we understand that, though utterly penniless, she must either get a hundred miles away from the threat – or acquire some protection.

What follows below was that first chapter. The only constraint was that I wanted the first two words to be Nora lived … because I planned this massive saga as a 12-volume, three-generation series in which the final volume would end with the words : … Nora died.

Chapter One

Monday, 26th August 1839

Nora lived a nightmare as she stood among the dripping carcasses of the but­cher’s mart and waited to see if her tactics had worked; all she could do now was hide, as still and as silent as the hanging sides of beef and pork. If she had been right, nothing would happen; but if she had been wrong … She was surprised at how exciting it was to know that her life really stood in the balance.

The blue man. The man with the blue bandanna. Pat Connally. He was the one who would kill her. They said he kept a golden guinea sewn into the lining of that blue bandanna and he used the weight of it to swing it around your neck and strangle you.

What a fool she had been to try to blackmail Charley Eade! Charley, you’re keepin’ ten quid a week for your own pocket out of this business. From now on I want two and a half for me!

Fool! she raged at herself, standing silent and hardly breathing among the gently swaying carcasses. Idiot! Stupid half wit! Numskull!

Thank God young Tony, Charley’s assistant, had told her in time – even though he hadn’t really meant to. Tony thought the idea of killing her was just a big joke. See them two men talking to Charley Eade? He’s paying them to kill thee! Yon fella with the blue bandanna. Pat Connally. He’s a killer! He does half the paid-up killings in Manchester, that Pat Connally. And then with great glee he told her how – the trick with the guinea weight.

As soon as she was convinced that Tony was not just pulling her leg, she turned, picked up her shawl, and walked away. She had to get away from the market; and then she’d have to get away from Manchester. But first the market.

It cost every mite of her courage not to run. She had to walk briskly enough to attract some slight attention. She forced herself to nod, smile, exchange a fleeting word with the porters, clerks, and salesmen who had befriended her these last three weeks – a pretty young girl of eighteen with a strong body, no family, and a good head for figures can soon make a long tally of friends among market men, even in so short a time. She had to lay an easily identifiable trail to the street. And there she had to vanish from Manchester as completely as if a giant hand had plucked her from the earth.

It all depended on how soon Charley Eade woke up to her absence. The nearer she got to the exit, the harder she fought her impulse to run.

But the hardest part was still to come. She reached the outside without being followed. A blear pink dawn suffused the sky away to the east, far off above Rochdale and Oldham. But here, above the city, still stretched the deep purple of the dying night. Away in the distance the cathedral clock struck five. The dark invited her to escape. Surely she could dash now to her lodging, retrieve the money she’d already blackmailed out of Charley Eade – or at least the six pounds that were left after last Saturday’s booze-up – and run! It was so tempting that she almost obeyed the urge.

Dozens of people in her situation would have done so. Six pounds! A year’s wages for a scullery maid. She knew dozens who would have gone back to get it before running. But people like that were the already defeated. Their destiny lay at the bottom of this rat fight. And what put them there and kept them there was the tendency to make such choices. An instinct sharpened by years of struggle upward through that throng warned her off.

If Eade had gone so far as to hire these two to attend to her, he’d not rest if he thought she was near. They’d watch her lodging even after it was relet. They’d make their way there at once, as soon as they were sure she’d left the market building. There would certainly be no time for her, hampered by her skirts, to return there, make her way upstairs, take out the panel by the door, and scrabble among the earth filling for the thread that led to the little bag with six sovereigns in it – not to do all that and make her escape.

So what they intended as a bait for her she would turn into a lure for them. But first she had to be sure that they had left.

As silent as her shadow, she slipped along the outside wall of the market building, threading her way carefully among the broken crates and chests, the discarded bales, the rotting vegetables, drunks, dead cats, rats, and ordure that gathers around civilized mankind. Then came the dangerous part. Having laid the trail to the outside, she had to get back in – unseen. Once they were convinced she had left, they’d never go back inside to look for her. But it had to be in a part of the market where she was not known: the butchers’ mart. In less than ten seconds she could get from the back exit to a secure place among the carcasses. But if in that time one of them came searching that way, or someone who knew her saw her, it would all be up. That was the risk in her plan.

The nearer she drew to the back exit, the louder the screams grew. They were killing the last of the pigs on the cobbles of the apron around the door. One jerked its death spasms over a great vat of steaming blood. Its predecessor silently endured a dowsing of boiling water. Another, even longer dead, appeared to sigh as its innards tumbled out into a tall barrel. Another, already shaved, hung gleaming and silent, turning this way and that, seeming to shiver in the flaring gaslight, waiting to be carried in. Beside it, deep in the shadows, Nora watched.

The squealing stopped. The last of the pigs was yielding the last of its blood. The raucous voice of the bloodpudding maker’s wife carried on into the silence as she and the pigkiller haggled on – just as they haggled here every morning of the working week. Oblivious to it all, a drunken girl in a faded blue dress wove an erratic course among the vats and the dead and dying pigs. She paid attention to no one; and none – save Nora – attended her. She had passed well out of the circle of light when she fell heavily among some broken tea chests. She did not rise. Nora noted the position; the girl was about her own size and build. Her clothing could be useful.

A porter came and took up the glistening carcass; it hung over his shoulder, looking oddly human. Using him as cover, Nora entered the building from which she had so recently escaped.

She grasped the layout with one quick sweep of her eyes. The newly killed pigs were to the right, nearest the door. The porter would head that way. Beyond hung those killed earlier, together with some sides of beef that had already hung a week. At the farther end of this section selling had just begun; a small knot of butchers and cooks surrounded the auctioneer.

The worst moment came when the porter turned aside with his carcass. The sanctuary she sought was only yards away, but there, turning from the crowd near the auctioneer, was one of the killers. She saw his blue bandanna! Or was it? In the bright light she could not be sure. And now it was too late for her to move.

She stood looking at the nearest carcasses as a butcher’s daughter might look, she hoped, and waited for the man to pass. As he drew level she turned casually to face him. A vast relief welled up within her: he was not the man! He had a blue bandanna but he was not the man. More important though, she noticed how he screwed up his eyes and peered toward the doors as if he could only just make them out. Of course! There were three big flares around the auctioneer.

Anyone coming from that end would think it pretty dark down here. She, coming in from the outside, had been led into the contrary error. Whoever he might be, the man with the bandanna had not even noticed her.

Fearless now, she slipped among the carcasses and waited for the real pursuer to come by. She was certain he would. They were of the mob and they knew their trade. They’d make a rapid search of the market. Go straight to her lodging. Then, finding her not yet returned, one would stay there while the other came back here for a further search and new instructions. The twenty or so minutes they were away would be the safe time, the only time, for her to make good her escape.

Curiously enough, it was only when she stood securely hidden that she felt the usual signs of fear – the racing heart and sinking stomach. Until then she had acted and thought in the coolest of spirits; if she had felt any emotion, it had been a kind of mad joy. To be hunted and to outwit your pursuers was to turn the tables and to become, in a way, a kind of hunter yourself. A hunter-from-in-front. You had the power. You dictated the play. You escaped. They lost you. The true hunter was always the one that did not lose.

Escape! But where? Sam, her younger brother, had gone back to Leeds last year and was now in service there somewhere. He’d always see her settled. But could she find him? In any case, there must be some of her father’s family left in Leeds. That’s where she’d have to go. Certainly there was no point in trying to go back to the mills in Stockport. Eade and his two would trace her back there with no difficulty. In fact, she hoped they would: it would let her get away to Leeds that much more easily.

She came back to her present surroundings with a jolt – and froze. The man with the blue bandanna – the real one this time – was standing not three yards from her. Standing. Not moving. Freakishly his eyes stared straight into hers. He cannot see me, she thought as she fought down the panic that had thrust her heart and lights up into her gullet. It’s much too dark. It’s not possible.

The man bit his lip and turned away to the exit. Nora counted thirty, forcing herself to count slowly, imagining herself walking through treacle and counting one for each footfall. She was so relieved to reach thirty that she almost relaxed her guard and walked out; but that same survivor’s instinct held her back. She edged her face slowly out for a quick peep. It was the saving of her, for the man still stood in the doorway, letting his eyes grow dark-accustomed, looking right and left, giving no sign of leaving.

Soon it became clear that he was waiting; probably the other man was working his way around the outside – the way Nora had crept. And indeed, before long, the other came breathlessly up from the shadows, heading for his companion in the doorway. He shook his head as he walked. At this the bandanna man set off for the main roadway, leaving his companion to follow close on his heels. Neither gave so much as a backward glance at the market building.

A crowd of drovers came out of one of the offices, up beyond the auctioneer; warm with hospitality they made for the door. As soon as they were past, Nora slipped out from among the carcasses and walked as if she were a straggler from their band, just in case one of the pursuers looked back. A drover turned and, seeing her, fell behind a pace or two and grabbed her around the waist. She smiled encouragement and joined the group, to shouts of bawdy approval.

But when they were well out of the light she slipped away and ran off into the darkness. The drover took three or four loud, laughing steps after her but made no genuine effort to follow. When their laughter had faded around the corner, she doubled back and sought for the crates where the girl in the blue dress had fallen. Blue was going to be her lucky colour this morning, after all!

She imagined it would be a matter of moments to get the unconscious girl’s dress off and change it for her own. In fact it took ten gruelling minutes, for nothing is less cooperative than a full-grown adult dead to the world. And all the while the sky was getting paler and the risk of discovery grew.

But she managed in the end. It was a wrench to part with her lovely red worsted dress and the dark brown shawl. And she despised the faded blue cotton thing and single petticoat she was to take in exchange. It hung so slack and straight that her boots peeped out beneath the hem. What was worse, her toes, in their turn, peeped out of the boots. On the brighter side, the borrowed clothes were much freer of vermin than Nora had feared. As a final touch she let down and disarranged the black coils of her well-kept hair.

At last, rising drunkenly from the spot where she had changed, she staggered off into the sooty dawn. When she risked a backward glance, she saw a dog sniff at the bare toes of the unconscious girl. Then it lifted its leg and staled them. The girl’s utter stillness made Nora think of death.

Thoughts of death had not been far away all spring and summer – what with the death of her father and then the terrible, terrible deaths of the two young children. She must shut that out. She could talk about it in company, and even sound quite matter-of-fact, but she must not think about it. Thinking could never bring; them back. Of course, she could not help it.

Dad! she whispered at the eastern sky.

And the eastern sky shivered asunder in a sea of hot salt. And she remembered his strong body and his gentle voice. And she remembered how home was always where he was, even when it held no food and he was desperate with the worry. And she remembered the ruin that followed his death and how there was never any more home. And she thought of the mess she had made of everything because he was not there to stop her. And more than anything she wanted someone to whom she could turn and just whisper. Sorry. Someone big like him. She wanted to start again.

But when she was out on the Oldham road, bound off for Leeds, and the sun was up, and the birds sang, and the day promised to be hot, she said to herself that this was a way of starting again. She remembered that her father was in a pauper’s grave in the abandoned cemetery beyond Littleborough.

I’ll give it a last tending afore I tramp back to Leeds, she said. And the thought came like a great comfort.

[The World from Rough Stones – end of Chapter 1]

The Rich Are With You Always – 1976

Starting the second volume of a trilogy, a quartet, or any sequence of novels that must ultimately combine to flesh out a single story, has to jump two hurdles. It must entice a new reader in exactly the same way as any singleton novel; but to the existing reader, fresh from Volume One, it ought not to introduce already established characters and themes as if they are new – with endless recapping in the imperfect tense: John had always … Nora had never … In their early days together she had often wondered … Back in dear old Huddersfield it had always been so easy to … God forbid!

The new reader, joining the saga at Volume Two, knows she will be rubbernecking on an established tale for a while and she'll forgive an unspoken assumption or two as long as the imperfect tense remains silent until she has completely bedded herself into the story. She will trust you to make sure of that; your job is to realize that this is part of your bargain with her.

So where had our saga reached by the end of the first volume – World from Rough Stones?

John Stevenson had risen from navvy ganger to successful contractor beginning to attract notice in high places; and his wife Nora had developed an admirable talent for business with a shrewd understanding of the many ways in which money works, especially among bankers. This next volume is going to pitch them into the maelstrom of the Railway Mania of the 1840s, which bankrupted even the mightiest of railway contractors and banks. That will form the background to their continued gentrification as they relentlessly climb the social ladder, trying to avoid all the traps that make the nouveaux riche a laughing stock. And all the while they must remain true to their original sterling selves.

I felt the best way to start the ball rolling was to pitch both of them into situations where such ambitions were put to the test. To the ultimate test? In some live-or-die situations? I decided not. The tests should be of the kind they might face every day – someone hopes to get the better of John in a business deal … someone hopes to put Nora down in an important social setting. These would be everyday challenges to such a couple in early Victorian times but they would resonate just as strongly with today's reader, too; the modern battleground might be completely different but what was at stake – reputation and dreams – would be timeless.

I felt the opening chapter here should deal with money (Nora's strength) and the assessment of character (John's forte).

The words desperate for money in the opening sentence state the theme of the entire book.

Chapter One

Beador was desperate for money. That ought to have made negotiations simple. Sir George Beador wanted money; and John Stevenson