I’m writing my fourth book at the moment and it’s not going the way I expected. To be specific: it’s taking its time. The pacing of Tales from the Triverse feel very different - much slower - than the fiction projects I’ve worked on before and I’ve been trying to pin down what’s going on.
My suspicion is that this is due to it having a foot in the crime genre, whereas my previous projects have all been firmly science fiction or fantasy. I’m also aiming at a slightly older readership. Let’s take a look at genre first.
Pacing in crime fiction
Tales from the Triverse is evidently still in the realm of sci-fi and fantasy (portals! Spaceships! Dragons!), taking place in an alternate 1970s London. It’s central narrative, though, is focused on a police department tasked with handling unusual crimes and that means the book hangs off a relatively traditional police procedural framework.
Specifically, I’m taking cues more from crime fiction on television than in literature. Although there’s a long game playing out in the background (and occasionally in the foreground), the main thrust of Triverse so far has been in episodic short stories. These each focus on a case being investigated by the detectives.
Something I realised very quickly is that to have an air of mystery requires withholding the truth. Retrospectively this is extremely obvious, but it wasn’t something I’d done before. All of my previous books had a mystery running through them, but that was the primary plot and it involved a slow reveal throughout the course of the entire book. With Triverse, each episodic storyline has its own mini-mystery in the form of a crime that has to be investigated.
Episodic storytelling in a weekly serial
Early on I’d considered having each weekly chapter be a complete case - the encountering of the crime, the investigation, the finale. That simply doesn’t work, given that my chapters tend to be around 1,500 words. I would either have to have very short and fast-paced criminal investigations, or I’d have to have much longer chapters. Neither of which appealed.
As such, most of the mini-stories that comprise Triverse have been at least three chapters long: each one having it’s own micro-sized three act structure. Even then, it can result in the plot being hyper-focused on the investigation itself, leaving little space for character and themes. To fit that in comfortably requires extending each storyline further; hence the current story (‘The creature’) which has had a couple of chapters without any direct action, but which has been very necessary to establish new characters and build atmosphere and tension.
I’ve also realised that my previous books have each had a central main plot driver. In A Day of Faces it was about Kay trying to figure out what was happening to her world and how to extract herself from the nightmare she’d fallen into; in The Mechanical Crown it was about insurrection and power struggles and being on the run; in No Adults Allowed it was very explicitly a road trip/descent into madness story with a singular trajectory. Tales from the Triverse, at least in its first two seasons, is primarily episodic, albeit with a recurring core cast. That means that the characters have to be compelling, in order to keep people coming back - which comes back to my previous point about needing to make space in the narrative for character work.
All my previous books had Adventure! in their DNA. Most chapters involved some form of derring-do. Triverse, on the other hand, is about adults going to work and doing their jobs - even if those jobs are being portal crime detectives. That means that chapters rely a lot more on investigation and conversation, rather than action and escapade.
It’s this:
vs this:
Writing for adults
The other fundamental shift I’ve made with Triverse is making it explicitly for an older readership. My previous books were written for a broad audience in terms of age, but were designed to be mostly suitable for a YA audience - say, around 14+. What I’m writing now is not that: it is more violent, the themes are more complex, the language is saltier and there’s more sex.
You know, all the things that make someone a grown-up: swearing, sex and punchy-punch.
That inevitably shifts the tone and therefore the pacing. These are not teenage or youthful characters going on grand adventures (with a couple of older mentors in tow); the core cast of Triverse is professionals in their 30s and 40s, with a couple of stragglers at either end of that spectrum.
As a consequence, a lot of these characters have more internalised motivations and thought processes. Without the catalyst of High Adventure! to bring out emotional responses and drive big decisions, the character moments tend to be smaller, subtler and more ambiguous. The morality in Tales from the Triverse is not as simple as in my previous books. While I’ve always tried to avoid Goodies Vs Baddies, that mix is even more fluid and grey.
This all makes for an exciting challenge and hopefully an engaging and exciting read. But I certainly didn’t quite anticipate how different it would feel to write, compared to my more overtly sci-fi and fantasy projects.
A lot of Triverse’s structure is due to shift and mutate over time, which fans of Babylon 5 are probably already recognising. That’ll bring changes to pacing as well, so I’ll return to this topic down the line.
In the meantime, if this has piqued your interest, you can start reading the book here:
Thanks for reading.
SKJ